looking for an article about the formation of israel

[Laura]

Those who Forget the Past

There is still the question hanging as to why our current culture has so little awareness of this vast and powerful Jewish Empire that dominated Eastern Europe and Western Asia for such a long period of time. The answer probably lies in the religious divisions and prejudices erected by the Catholic Church in Rome after the crusades in an effort to hide the perfidy of the destruction of their co-religionists, the Eastern Orthodox Church of Byzantium. So, let's back up just a bit back to the same point in time when the Magyars went across the Carpathians, thus depriving the Khazars of their protection in the buffer zone, taking many Jews with them. At that point, as noted above, the Rus took over Kiev in a bloodless coup. There is a reason that they were able to do this.

Three years earlier, the Byzantine emperor set out against the Saracens. He hadn't been gone long when a messenger came to tell him to turn around and return to Constantinople as soon as possible because 200 Russian ships had entered the Bosporus from the Black Sea and were sacking the suburbs of the city. This attack had been coordinated with a simultaneous attack of a western Viking fleet approaching Constantinople across the Mediterranean. The master mind behind this almost capture of Constantinople was Rurik of Novgorod, AKA Rorik of Jutland.

The Byzantines now realized what they were up against and, as Koestler notes, decided to play the double game. Treaties were signed in 860 and 866. Scandinavian sailors were recruited into the Byzantine fleet and the famous Varangian Guard was formed. Later treaties in 945 and 971, led to the Principality of Kiev supplying the Byzantine Emperor with troops on request. In 957, Princess Olga of Kiev was baptized on her state visit to Constantinople.

In 988, during the reign of St. Vladimir, the ruling dynasty of the Russians finally and definitively adopted Christianity via the Greek Orthodox Church.

At about the same time, the Hungarians, Poles and Scandinavians converted to Roman Catholicism. The lines of religious division were being drawn across the world.

With new alliances and new enemies, the Khazars were, it seems, no longer needed. Now the taxes they charged on all the commerce between Russia and Byzantine and the West and the East became a burden no longer to be borne. The Byzantines sacrificed the Khazar alliance in favor of a Russian d�tente.

The destruction of the capital city of Khazaria, Sarkel, by Svyatoslav of Kiev in 965, was the end of the Khazar empire, though the state continued to exist for a time.

In 1016, a combined Russian-Byzantine army invaded Khazaria, defeated its ruler and "subdued the country".

The Russians were unable to hold against the tide of nomad warriors from the Steppes. The constant pressure pushed the center of Russian power north and Kiev went into decline. Independent principalities arose and fell, creating chaos and endless war. Into this vacuum rode the Ghuzz, "pagan and godless foes" also known as Polovtsi, Kumans, Kun or Kipchaks. They ruled the steppes from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century when they were overrun by the Mongols.

The Eastern Steppes were plunged into darkness and the later history of the Khazars is shrouded in obscurity. Arab chroniclers speak of a temporary exodus of the population to the Caspian shore, but these apparently later returned with the aid of the Muslim Shah of Shirwan. More than one source speaks of this exodus, and eventual return, with the aid of the Muslims. The price of this Muslim help was conversion to Islam. So, ironically, it seems certain that many of the Muslims of that area of the world, now so reviled by the current Jewish state, are most likely their close kin. Again, we understand more about the chart of genetic kinship.

~~~

The first non-Arab mention of Khazaria after 965 is a travel report by Ibrahim Ibn Jakub, the Spanish-Jewish ambassador to Otto the Great. He described the Khazars as still flourishing in 973. The Russian Chronicles give an account of Jews from Khazaria arriving in Kiev in 986.

A later mention, in the Russian Chronicle for the year 1023, describes Prince Mtislav marching against his brother Prince Yaroslav with a force of Khazars and Kasogians. Seven years later, a Khazar army is reported to have defeated a Kurdish invading force.

In 1079, the Russian Chronicle says, "The Khazars of Tmutorakan took Oleg prisoner and shipped him overseas to Tsargrad (Constantinople)". Four years later, Oleg was allowed to return to Tmutorakan where, "he slaughtered the Khazars who had counseled the death of his brother and had plotted against himself".

Around A.D. 1100, the Christian saint, Eustratius was a prisoner in Cherson, in the Crimea, and was ill-treated by his "Jewish master", who forced ritual Passover food on him. Koestler emphasizes that the story is probably bunk, but what is important is that it takes a strong Jewish presence in the town for granted.

The last mention of the Khazars in the Russian chronicle is in 1106. About 50 years later, two Persian poets mention a joint Khazar-Rus invasion of Shirwan and speak of Dervent Khazars. At around the same time, there is a "short and grumpy" (Koestler's term) remark made by the Jewish traveler, Rabbi Petachia of Regensburg, who was scandalized at the lack of Talmudic learning among the Khazar Jews when he crossed Khazaria.

The last mention of the Khazars as a nation is dated around 1245, at which point in time, the Mongols had already established the greatest nomad empire in the world, extending from Hungary to China. Pope Innocent IV sent a mission to Batu Khan, grandson of Jinghiz Khan, ruler of the Western part of the Mongol Empire. Franciscan friar, Joannes de Plano Carpini visited the capital of Batu Khan: Sarai Batu, AKA Saksin, AKA Itil, the former city of the Khazars.

After his return, Plano Carpini wrote in his famous history a list of the regions he visited, as well as the occupants. He mentions, along with the Alans and Circassians, the "Khazars observing the Jewish religion".

Then, darkness.

Bar Hebraeus, one of the greatest Syriac scholars, relates that the father of Seljuk, (the founder of the Seljuk Turk dynasty), Tukak, was a commander in the army of the Khazar Kagan and that Seljuk himself was brought up at the Kagan's court. He was banned from the court for being too familiar with the Kagan.

Another source speaks of Seljuk's father as, "one of the notables of the Khazar Turks". Thus, there seems to have been an intimate relationship between the Khazars and the founders of the Seljuk dynasty. There was an obvious break, but whether it was because of conversion to Islam, or whether conversion to Islam came about because of the break in relations, we cannot know. What seems to be evident is that Khazars were absorbed into Hungarians, Turks, and "Mongols." Then, of course, there are the Ashkenazi Jews.

Russian epics and folk tales give us a few scattered bits to consider after the expiration of the official chronicles. They speak of the "country of the Jews" and "Jewish heroes" who fought against Russians and ruled the steppes. Legends from the Middle ages circulated among Western Jews tell of a "kingdom of the Red Jews".

"The Jews of other lands were flattered by the existence of an independent Jewish state. Popular imagination found here a particularly fertile field. Just as the biblically minded Slavonic epics speak of 'Jews' rather than Khazars, so did western Jews long after spin romantic tales around those 'red Jews', so styled perhaps because of the slight Mongolian pigmentation of many Khazars.

Notice Koestler's report above about Rabbi Petachia of Regensburg, who was scandalized at the lack of Talmudic learning among the Khazar Jews when he crossed Khazaria around 1150. Even with the lack of learning, strange things were going on among the Khazarian Jews at this time.

In the twelfth century there arose in Khazaria a Messianic movement, a rudimentary attempt at a Jewish crusade, aimed at the conquest of Palestine by force of arms. The initiator of the movement was a Khazar Jew, one Solomon ben Duji, aided by his son Menahem and a Palestinian scribe. They wrote letters to all the Jews, near and far, in all the lands around them ... They said that the time had come in which God would gather Israel, His people from all lands to Jerusalem, the holy city, and that Solomon Ben Duji was Elijah, and his son was the Messiah.

These appeals were apparently addressed to the Jewish communities in the Middle East, and seemed to have had little effect, for the next episode takes place only about twenty years later, when young Menahem assumed the name David al-Roy, and the title of Messiah. Though the movement originated in Khazaria, its centre soon shifted to Kurdistan. Here David assembled a substantial armed force - possibly of local Jews, reinforced by Khazars - and succeeded in taking possession of the strategic fortress of Amadie, northeast of Mosul. From here he may have hoped to lead his army to Edessa, and fight his way through Syria into the Holy Land. [...]

Among the Jews of the Middle East, David certainly aroused fervent Messianic hopes. One of his messages came to Baghdad and ... instructed its Jewish citizens to assemble on a certain night on their flat roofs, whence they would be flown on clouds to the Messiah's camp. A goodly number of Jews spent that night on their roofs awaiting the miraculous flight.

But the rabbinical hierarchy in Baghdad, fearing reprisals by the authorities, took a hostile attitude to the pseudo-Messiah and threatened him with a ban. Not surprisingly, David al-Roy was assassinated - apparently in his sleep, allegedly by his own father-in-law...

His memory was venerated, and when Benjamin of Tudela traveled through Persia twenty years after the event, 'they still spoke lovingly of their leader'. But the cult did not stop there. According to one theory, the six-pointed 'shield of David' which adorns the modern Israeli flag, started to become a national symbol with David a- Roy's crusade. [...]

During the half millennium of its existence and its aftermath in the East European communities, this noteworthy experiment in Jewish statecraft doubtless exerted a greater influence on Jewish history than we are as yet able to envisage.

Indeed it very well may have. Notice that "Solomon ben Duji, aided by his son Menahem and a Palestinian scribe wrote letters to all the Jews, near and far, in all the lands around them ... They said that the time had come in which God would gather Israel, His people from all lands to Jerusalem, the holy city..."

Prior to this time, apparently, there had been no such thing as a "messianic movement" among Jews that promoted the idea of "returning to Israel." It was an invention of an apparent lunatic who believed that they were all going to be raptured from their rooftops.

Nowadays, the "traditional Jewish understanding" of the messiah is non-supernatural, and is best elucidated by Maimonides in his commentary to tractate Sanhedrin, of the Babylonian Talmud. He writes:

The Messianic age is when the Jews will regain their independence and all return to the land of Israel. The Messiah will be a very great king, he will achieve great fame, and his reputation among the gentile nations will be even greater than that of King Solomon. His great righteousness and the wonders that he will bring about will cause all peoples to make peace with him and all lands to serve him....

Nothing will change in the Messianic age, however, except that Jews will regain their independence. Rich and poor, strong and weak, will still exist. However it will be very easy for people to make a living, and with very little effort they will be able to accomplish very much.... it will be a time when the number of wise men will increase...war shall not exist, and nation shall no longer lift up sword against nation....

The Messianic age will be highlighted by a community of the righteous and dominated by goodness and wisdom. It will be ruled by the Messiah, a righteous and honest king, outstanding in wisdom, and close to God. Do not think that the ways of the world or the laws of nature will change, this is not true. The world will continue as it is. The prophet Isaiah predicted "The wolf shall live with the sheep, the leopard shall lie down with the kid." This, however, is merely allegory, meaning that the Jews will live safely, even with the formerly wicked nations. All nations will return to the true religion and will no longer steal or oppress.

Note that all prophecies regarding the Messiah are allegorical - Only in the Messianic age will we know the meaning of each allegory and what it comes to teach us. Our sages and prophets did not long for the Messianic age in order that they might rule the world and dominate the gentiles, the only thing they wanted was to be free for Jews to involve themselves with the Torah and its wisdom.

This view is accepted by Orthodox Judaism today, but notice the similarity of the ideas to those promoted by the above mentioned Khazarian Jew Solomon ben Duji, and his son Menahem. As it happens, it is very likely that Maimonides was influenced by this pair since he would have been coming to adulthood at about the same time that these ideas were being promulgated and he moved in areas and circles where he would surely have heard the stories of the attempt by those Khazarian Jews to re-take Jerusalem and re-establish a Jewish kingdom on Earth.

Maimonides was born March 30, 1135 (died December 13, 1204) in C�rdoba, Spain, then under Muslim rule during what some scholars consider to be the end of the golden age of Jewish culture in Spain. Maimonides studied Torah under his father Maimon who had in turn studied under Rabbi Joseph ibn Migash.

The Almohades conquered C�rdoba in 1148, and offered the Jewish community the choice of conversion to Islam, death, or exile. Maimonides's family, along with most other Jews, chose exile. For the next ten years they moved about in southern Spain, avoiding the conquering Almohades, but eventually settled in Fes in Morocco, where Maimonides acquired most of his secular knowledge, studying at the University of Fes. During this time, he composed his acclaimed commentary on the Mishnah.

Following this sojourn in Morocco, he briefly lived in the Holy Land, spending time in Jerusalem, and finally settled in Fostat, Egypt; where he was doctor of the Grand Vizier Alfadhil and also possibly the doctor of Sultan Saladin of Egypt. In Egypt, he composed most of his oeuvre, including the Mishneh Torah. He died in Fostat, and was buried in Tiberias (today in Israel).

His son Avraham, recognized as a great scholar, succeeded him as Nagid (head of the Egyptian Jewish Community), as well as in the office of court physician, at the age of only eighteen. He greatly honored the memory of his father, and throughout his career defended his father's writings against all critics. The office of Nagid was held by the Maimonides family for four successive generations until the end of the 14th century.

Although his copious works on Jewish law and ethics was initially met with opposition during his lifetime, he was posthumously acknowledged to be one of the foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers in Jewish history. Today, his works and his views are considered a cornerstone of Orthodox Jewish thought and study.

Maimonides was by far the most influential figure in medieval Jewish philosophy. A popular medieval saying that also served as his epitaph states, From Moshe (of the Torah) to Moshe (Maimonides) there was none like Moshe.

Radical Jewish scholars in the centuries that followed can be characterised as "Maimonideans" or "anti-Maimonideans". Moderate scholars were eclectics who largely accepted Maimonides' Aristotelian world-view, but rejected those elements of it which they considered to contradict the religious tradition.

Notice the mention of the fact that Maimonides' ideas were met with opposition and were said to contradict the Jewish religious tradition. One suspects that Rabbi Petachia of Regensburg, who was scandalized at the lack of Talmudic learning among the Khazar Jews when he crossed Khazaria around 1150, would also have ben scandalized at the work of Maimonides as well since it was the lack of Talmudic learning among the Khazar Jews that undoubtedly led to the eruption of the idea of the re-gathering of the Jews to Israel. We notice that "Among the Jews of the Middle East, [the Khazarian Jew who claimed he was the messiah], David certainly aroused fervent Messianic hopes" and Maimonides was certainly a Jew in the Middle East at a time that was not long after this madness had taken hold and spread like a disease. It is most ironic that the idea of Zionism as it exists today, formulated and promoted by Ashkenazi Jews, was originally created by Khazarian Jews over 700 years earlier.

In general, the reduced Khazar kingdom persevered. It waged a more or less effective defence against all foes until the middle of the thirteenth century, when it fell victim to the great Mongol invasion... Even then it resisted stubbornly until the surrender of all its neighbors. Its population was largely absorbed by the Golden Horde which had established the centre of its empire in Khazar territory. But before and after the Mongol upheaval, the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centres of Eastern Europe.

Here, then, we have the cradle of the numerically strongest and culturally dominant part of modern Jewry."

 

[Laura]

Further Back in Time

Finding the "cradle of the numerically strongest and culturally dominant part of modern Jewry" doesn't really tell us if they were the "Children of Israel." Even if we consider it absurd to just hand the country belonging to a different people for about 2000 years to a different group because they say their God gave it to them, we are interested in finding out if their claims that they are - even from their own point of view - entitled to that land can be true. So, we continue back in time to search for the origins of the Ashkenazi.

Now, we know a great deal about the Khazars in a particular period of history, but we still know nothing about where they came from, which is the burning question. Can they legitimately claim to be Jews genetically, thus having a claim (even if based on a fraudulent history) to Palestine?

We recall that the Georgians and Armenians, having been repeatedly devastated by the Khazars, identified them as Gog and Magog. We also recall that the Arab chroniclers wrote that the Khazars were, "white, their eyes blue, their hair flowing and predominantly reddish, their bodies large, and their natures cold. Their general aspect is wild".

It doesn't sound much like the depictions of the Hebrews in the ancient art we are familiar with such as Egyptian, Babylonian, and so on. However, it does sound a lot like the ancient Aryan tribes; they were fierce with wild, flowing blonde or red hair, cold natured, yet susceptible to a "furor" that came on them accompanied by great heat. That, of course, reminds us of the genetic issues of mtDNA: mitochondria and its function: the powerhouse of the body that works by virtue of its oxygen-capturing enzymes.

An Armenian writer described them as having, "insolent, broad, lashless faces and long falling hair, like women". Again, this description of the Khazars sound a lot like descriptions of the "long haired Franks". So, let us look at the Franks and see if we track them back in time and discover anything.

History of the Franks

The Franks or the Frankish people were one of several west Germanic federations. The confederation was formed out of Germanic tribes: Salians, Sugambri, Chamavi, Tencteri, Chattuarii, Bructeri, Usipetes, Ampsivarii, Chatti. They entered the late Roman Empire from present central Germany and the Southern Netherlands and settled in northern Gaul where they were accepted as a foederati and established a rather long-lasting realm in an area which eventually covered most of modern-day France, the Low Countries, and the western regions of Germany, forming the historic kernel of all these modern countries.

Two dynasties of leaders succeeded each other; first the Merovingians and then the Carolingians. The Merovingian kings claimed descent of their dynasty from the Sicambri, a Scythian or Cimmerian tribe, asserting that this tribe had changed their name to "Franks" in 11 BC, following their defeat and relocation by Drusus, under the leadership of a certain chieftain called Franko.

Right here our attention is caught: The Franks descend from Scythians? Recall that Koestler recounts that other sources indicate that the Khazars were intimately connected with the Huns; an interesting connection considering the legend that the Huns were a tribe of peoples that "descended from Scythian witches who, cast out of their tribes, mated with devils in the desert." Let's remember also that one of the earliest factual references to the Khazars occurs in a Syriac chronicle dating from the middle of the sixth century. It mentions the Khazars in a list of people who inhabit the region of the Caucasus.

It is conjectured that the Franks came from the East - the area of the Scythians and Khazars - and they met and mingled with the Frisians.

The areas that the Frisians originate from was settled as early as 3500 BC. Yes, that's over 5000 years ago, long before Abraham was allegedly stomping around Israel. There were comings and goings of additional peoples as the archaeological records show, but it seems to be possible to systematically track who was who and who went where by their pottery and other artifacts.

The coming of the Romans to the southern Netherlands in 12 BC prevented the Frisians from expanding their territory to the south of the Amstel and the Rhine. Around the year 150 BC, the Frisians also lost the Groningen salt-marshes to the Chatti who had advanced from East Friesland.

A list of place-names compiled in Alexandria by geographer Claudius Ptolameus (Ptolemy) c.150 AD was turned into maps by Europeans in the 15th century. These maps also supply the names of those tribes dwelling along the North Sea coastal regions. The evidence indicates that Saxons lived in southwest Jutland (Ribe and southwards), North Friesland and Ditmarschen - as far as the Elbe. Then we see that between the Elbe and the Weser lived the "greater" Chatti, while the "lesser" Chatti lived in East Friesland. The descriptions given by Ptolemy agrees with what has been reconstructed from the archaeological finds.

Depopulation of the Frisian salt-marshes occurred between 250 and 400 AD due to the rising sea levels and flooding and, undoubtedly, the cometary destruction of Europe mentioned above. This resulted in an almost total depopulation of the Frisians in North Holland. This depopulation not only affected Frisian areas. In the Baltic and northern European coastal regions, the population retreated to the higher areas inland during the second century AD. Where the Frisians went still cannot be stated with certainty. It is thought that some of them migrated to Flanders in the 3rd century, and from there crossed over to Kent in England. Frisian Tritzumer pottery has been found in both regions. Kerst Huisman has theorized that the Frisians of the flooded salt-marshes migrated to East Friesland and there, together with the Chatti, formed the tribe known as the Franks. There came into being, at any rate, a new tribe bearing the name of the Franks about the year 300 AD. We wonder if some of them also migrated to the area that later became the Kingdom of the Khazars?

The presence of the tribe known as the Chatti has been mentioned by several ancient sources. What I find to be of great interest is that the Hittites were also known as the Chatti and Abraham, the patriarch of the Jews, was said to have been a Hittite; that is to say, an Aryan. I began to wonder if the so-called pejorative characteristics that were historically assigned to Jews might actually be an "Aryan cultural inheritance?" It is, after all, the "Salic Law," from the Salian Franks, that deprived women of the rights of inheritance and the position of women was seriously degraded with the impostion of monotheism through Judaism.

But, let's stop here for a bit and go in a slightly different direction.

Above we have stated that the experts note that Frisian Tritzumer pottery has been found in Kent in England. This brings us to consider another fascinating item: the bizarre belief of the ancient Armenians and Georgians that the Khazars were Gog and Magog.

In Genesis, we find the following:

10:1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. 10:2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. 10:3 And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. 10:4 And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. 10:5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

It's truly interesting to note that the word "Ashkenaz" is listed as a name of one of great grandsons of Noah, through the "gentile" line. What about the "isles of the Gentiles?"

The only other real mention of Gog and Magog is in a truly weird prophecy given by the prophet Ezekiel:

38:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 38:2 Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him, 38:3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: 38:4 And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords: 38:5 Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet: 38:6 Gomer, and all his bands; the house of Togarmah of the north quarters, and all his bands: and many people with thee.

38:7 Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them. 38:8 After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations, and they shall dwell safely all of them.

38:9 Thou shalt ascend and come like a storm, thou shalt be like a cloud to cover the land, thou, and all thy bands, and many people with thee.

38:10 Thus saith the Lord GOD; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought: 38:11 And thou shalt say, I will go up to the land of unwalled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates, 38:12 To take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.

38:13 Sheba, and Dedan, and the merchants of Tarshish, with all the young lions thereof, shall say unto thee, Art thou come to take a spoil? hast thou gathered thy company to take a prey? to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to take a great spoil?

38:14 Therefore, son of man, prophesy and say unto Gog, Thus saith the Lord GOD; In that day when my people of Israel dwelleth safely, shalt thou not know it? 38:15 And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army: 38:16 And thou shalt come up against my people of Israel, as a cloud to cover the land; it shall be in the latter days, and I will bring thee against my land, that the heathen may know me, when I shall be sanctified in thee, O Gog, before their eyes.

38:17 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Art thou he of whom I have spoken in old time by my servants the prophets of Israel, which prophesied in those days many years that I would bring thee against them?

38:18 And it shall come to pass at the same time when Gog shall come against the land of Israel, saith the Lord GOD, that my fury shall come up in my face. 38:19 For in my jealousy and in the fire of my wrath have I spoken, Surely in that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel; 38:20 So that the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground.

38:21 And I will call for a sword against him throughout all my mountains, saith the Lord GOD: every man's sword shall be against his brother. 38:22 And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that are with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.

38:23 Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the LORD.

39:1 Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog, and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: 39:2 And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts, and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel: 39:3 And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand. 39:4 Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy bands, and the people that is with thee: I will give thee unto the ravenous birds of every sort, and to the beasts of the field to be devoured. 39:5 Thou shalt fall upon the open field: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.

39:6 And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD. 39:7 So will I make my holy name known in the midst of my people Israel; and I will not let them pollute my holy name any more: and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel.

Here, we also need to remember that curious series of events surrounding the establishment of the Old Testament as we know it (more or less) today, the oldest text of which is dated only to the 10 century: Recall the story of Isaac ibn Yashush, the Jewish court physician of the 11th century who pointed out that someone who lived after Moses wrote the Edomite king list. He was called "Isaac the Blunderer" by Abraham ibn Ezra, a 12th century rabbi who said, regarding the fact that Moses could not have written the Torah "And if you understand, then you will recognize the truth. And he who understands will keep silent."

Since we now know that Maimonides, the 12 century rabbi whose views are now accepted by Orthodox Judaism was most likely influenced by the above mentioned Khazarian Jew Solomon ben Duji, and his son Menahem, and that they were the source of the ideas of re-taking Jerusalem and establishing a Jewish kingdom on earth, it all begins to make a sick sort of sense. We are also reminded at this moment that the great Jewish scholar, Rashi de Troyes, said that the Genesis narrative, going back to the creation of the world, was written to justify genocide in the re-taking of Israel.

Sounds like a conspiracy, doesn't it? "And if you understand, then you will recognize the truth. And he who understands will keep silent."

Indeed, the Lord works in mysterious ways!!! Even when you know how the Bible came to be written, when you begin to understand how the ideas came to be accepted as "holy writ" it makes your skin crawl.

Returning to Gog and Magog: there is another mention in the book of Revelation:

20:7 And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, 20:8 And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. 20:9 And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. 20:10 And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

This leads to a couple other interesting items in Revelation:

2:8 And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write; These things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive; 2:9 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

3:9 Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.

Apparently, quite a few people knew things back in those times that have been lost to us.

As we noted, depopulation of the Frisian salt-marshes is said to have occurred between 250 and 400 AD due to the rising sea levels and flooding. Later, undoubtedly, the cometary destruction of Europe led to tribes long settled going on the march. Most probably, this is the ultimate reason for the almost total depopulation of the Frisians in North Holland.

As the experts note (though they can't come up with a real reason for it unless they look at the ideas of cometary destruction), this depopulation did not just affect Frisian areas. In the Baltic and northern European coastal regions, the population retreated to the higher areas inland during the second century AD, and certainly were on the move when the comets came. So, either there were two periods of depopulation, or only one and the dating is incorrect.

Now, let's have a look at ethnographer Lev Gumilev's work on Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere:

"Names deceive. When one is studying the general patterns of ethnology one must remember above all that a real ethnos and an ethnonym, i.e. ethnic name, are not the same thing.

We often encounter several different ethnoi bearing one and the same name; conversely, one ethnos may be called differently. The word 'Romans' (romani), for instance, originally meant a citizen of the polis Rome, but not all the Italics and not even the Latins who inhabited other towns of Latium.

In the epoch of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries A.D. the number of Romans increased through the inclusion among them of all Italians-Etruscans, Samnites, Ligurians, Gauls, and many inhabitants of the provinces, by no means of Latin origin.

After the edict of Caracalla in A.D. 212 all free inhabitants of municipalities on the territory of the Roman Empire were called 'Romans', i.e. Greeks, Cappadocians, Jews, Berbers, Gauls, Illyrians, Germans, etc. The concept 'Roman' lost its ethnic meaning, it would seem, but that was not so; it simply changed it.

The general element became unity not even of culture, but of historical fate, instead of unity of origin and language. The ethnos existed in that form for three centuries, a considerable period, and did not break up.

On the contrary, it was transformed in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., through the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, which began to be the determinant principle after the fourth ecumenical council. Those who recognized these councils sanctioned by the state authority were Romans, and those who did not became enemies.

A new ethnos was formed on that basis, that I conventionally call 'Byzantine', but they themselves called themselves 'Romaic', i.e. 'Romans', though they spoke Greek.

A large number of Slavs, Armenians, and Syrians were gradually merged among the Romaic, but they retained the name 'Romans' until 1453, until the fall of Constantinople. The Romaic considered precisely themselves 'Romans', but not the population of Italy, where Langobards had become feudal lords, Syrian Semites, (who had settled in Italy, which had become deserted, in the first to third centuries A.D.), the townsmen, and the former colons from prisoners of war of all peoples at any time conquered by the Romans of the Empire became peasants.

Florentines, Genoese, Venetians, and other inhabitants of Italy considered themselves 'Romans', and not the Greeks, and on those grounds claimed the priority of Rome where only ruins remained of the antique city.

A third branch of the ethnonym 'Romans' arose on the Danube, which had been a place of exile after the Roman conquest of Dacia. There Phrygians, Cappadocians, Thracians, Galatians, Syrians, Greeks, Illyrians, in short, all the eastern subjects of the Roman Empire, served sentences for rebellion against Roman rule. To understand one another they conversed in the generally known Latin tongue. When the Roman legions left Dacia, the descendants of the exiled settlers remained and formed an ethnos that took the name 'Romanian', i.e. 'Roman', in the nineteenth century.

If one can treat the continuity between 'Romans' of the age of the Republic, and the 'Roman citizens' of the late Empire, even as a gradual extension of the concept functionally associated with the spread of culture, there is no such link even between the Byzantines and the Romans, from which it follows that the word changed meaning and content and cannot serve as an identifying attribute of the ethnos.

It is obviously also necessary to take into consideration the context in which the word - and so the epoch - has a semantic content, because the meaning of words changes in the course of time. That is even more indicative when we analyze the ethnonyms 'Turk', 'Tatar', and 'Mongol', an example that cannot be left aside.

Examples of camouflage. In the sixth century A.D. a small people living on the eastern slopes of the Altai and Khangai mountains were called Turks. Through several successful wars they managed to subordinate the whole steppe from Hingan to the Sea of Azov. [i.e. the Khazars]

The subjects of the Great Kaghanate, who preserved their own ethnonyms for internal use, also began to be called Turks, since they were subject to the Turkish Khan.

When the Arabs conquered Sogdiana and clashed with the nomads, they began to call all of them Turks, including the Ugro-Magyars.

In the eighteenth century, European scholars called all nomads 'les Tartars', and in the nineteenth century, when linguistic classification became fashionable, the name 'Turk' was arrogated to a definite group of languages.

Many peoples thus fell into the category 'Turk' who had not formed part of it in antiquity, for example the Yakuts, Chuvash and the hybrid people, the Ottoman Turks.

The modification of the ethnonym 'Tatar' is an example of direct camouflage. Up to the twelfth century this was the ethnic name of a group of 30 big clans inhabiting the banks of the Korulen. In the twelfth century this nationality increased in numbers, and Chinese geographers began to call all the Central Asian nomads (Turkish speaking, Tungus-speaking, and Mongol-speaking), including the Mongols, Tatars. And even when, in 1206, Genghis-khan officially called all his subjects Mongols, neighbors continued for some time from habit to call them Tatars.

In this form the word 'Tatar' reached Eastern Europe as a synonym of the word 'Mongol', and became acclimatized in the Volga Valley where the local population began, as a mark of loyalty to the Khan of the Golden Horde to call themselves Tatars. But the original bearers of this name (Kereites, Naimans, Oirats, and Tatars) began to call themselves Mongols. The names thus changed places.

Since that time a scientific terminology arose in which the Tatar anthropological type began to be called 'Mongoloid', and the language of the Volga Kipchak-Turks Tatar. In other words we even employ an obviously camouflaged terminology in science.

But then it is not simply a matter of confusion, but of an ethnonymic phantasmagoria. Not all the nomad subjects of the Golden Horde were loyal to its government. The rebels who lived in the steppes west of the Urals began to call themselves Nogai, and those who lived on the eastern borders of the Jochi ulus, in Tarbagatai and on the banks of the Irtysh, and who were practically independent, because of their remoteness from the capital, became the ancestors of the Kazakhs.

These ethnoi arose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a consequence of rapid mixing of various ethnic components. The ancestors of the Nogai were the Polovtsy, steppe Alans, Central Asian Turks, who survived a defeat by Batu and were taken into the Mongol army, and inhabitants of the southern frontier of Rus, who adopted Islam, which became a symbol at that time of ethnic consolidation.

Thus, the Tatars included Kama Bulgars, Khazars, and Burtasy, and also some of the Polovtsy and Ugric Mishari. The population of the White Horde was the mixture; three Kazakh jus were formed from it in the fifteenth century.

But that is not yet all. At the end of the fifteenth century, Russian bands from the Upper Volga began to attack the Middle Volga Tatar towns, forced some of the population to quit their homeland and go off into Central Asia under the chieftainship of Sheibani-khan (1500-1510). There they were met as fierce enemies because the local Turks who at that time bore the name of 'Chagatai' (after Genghis-khan's second son Chagatei, the chief of the Central Asian ulus), were ruled by descendants of Timur, the enemy of the steppe and Volga Tatars, who ravaged the Volga Valley in 1398-1399.

The members of the horde who quit their homeland took on a new name 'Uzbeks' to honor the Khan Uzbeg (1312-1341), who had established Islam in the Golden Horde as the state religion. In the sixteenth century the 'Uzbeks' defeated Babur, the last of the Timurides, who led the remnants of his supporters into India and conquered a new kingdom for himself there.

So the Turks who remained in Samarkand and Ferghana bear the name of their conquerors, the Uzbeks. The same Turks, who went to India, began to be called 'Moghuls' in memory of their having been, three hundred years earlier, subject to the Mongol Empire.

But the genuine Mongols who settled in eastern Iran in the thirteenth century, and even retained their language, are called Khazareitsy from the Persian word khazar - a thousand (meaning a military unit, or division).

But where are the Mongols, by whose name the yoke that lay on Rus for 240 years is known?

They were not an ethnos, because by Genghis-khan's will Jochi, Batu, Orda, and Sheibani each received 4, 000 warriors, of whom only part came from the Far East. The latter were called 'Kins' and not 'Tatars', from the Chinese name of the Jurchen. This rare name occurred for the last time in the Zadonshchina, in which Mamai was called Kinnish.

Consequently, the yoke was not Mongol at all, but was enforced by the ancestors of the nomad Uzbeks, who should not be confused with the settled Uzbeks, although they merged in the nineteenth century, and now constitute a single ethnos, who equally revere the Timurides and the Sheibanides, who were deadly enemies in the sixteenth century, because that enmity had already lost sense and meaning in the seventeenth century."

We realize from the work of Lev Gumilev that names of groups can change in context as well as content. Additionally, language is not always a clue as to origin since languages can be imposed on conquered peoples who then believe that it is their own, or adopted out of necessity.

One example of such a problem is the case of the Finns, Saami (Laplanders), Estonians and Magyars. Their language is called Uralic because such languages are mostly spoken to the east of the Ural Mountains, but obviously, the Finns, Estonians, Saami and Magyars are West of the Ural Mountains. Did they ALL come from the Urals?

No. The genetic evidence indicates that the Finns and Estonians seem to be almost entirely European, while the Magyars have a 12 percent Uralic genetic origin. On the other hand, while the Saami are dominantly genetically European, there is still a genetic connection between the Magyars and the Saami. Additionally, the Finnish population is subject to an unusual collection of genetic diseases that are either very rare or entirely unknown elsewhere. This suggests a bottleneck founder event.

The explanation then is that a very small group entered Finland about 2,000 years ago where the Saami population already lived. The Saami retreated to the north, but there was obviously sufficient contact for the Finns to learn the Saami language, while still not intermarrying to any great degree. The reason they would have adopted the Saami language would be because, in a hostile environment, they needed to learn the local dialect of the only people who knew how to survive and get around in Finland's maze of lakes, fjords, and forests.

In short, just because the Finns and Magyars speak a similar language, doesn't mean that they are genetically close. The same is probably true for the tribes of the Middle East who came to be known as "Semitic" after the conquest of Sargon, who came down from the North and was, most probably, from one of the Aryan steppe tribes. At that time, the Sumerian peoples were developing writing for their agricultural civilization, and this writing was then utilized for the Semitic language of Sargon - the official tongue after the conquest - while the Sumerian language became extinct. The extensive population of Sumerians then came to think of themselves as "Semitic" because they were under the rule of a Semitic elite when, in fact, they weren't - at least not in the terms meant by "Semitic" at that period.

The word "semitic" is somewhat troublesome for a variety of reasons. In linguistic terms, it is well-defined to include ancient and modern versions of Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian, Hebrew, Maltese, Syriac, Tigrinya, etc. The problems arise - as we have seen from the work of Gumilev - when you try to use it for populations, ethnicities, genetics, and so on.

 

[Laura]

The Mystery of the Guanches

The Guanches, the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands present us with an interesting clue:

The original inhabitants of the Canary Islanders referred to themselves as "Canari" long before the Romans arrived. The name appears to have had a similar meaning in both Latin and the native speech, which was a mixed Indo-European language with at least several Latin cognates.

Previous to the 1st century AD, the Atlantic group was known throughout the Mediterranean World as the Blessed Isles, the Fortunate Isles, the Hesperides, or the Isles of the Blessed. Forgotten for all of classical civilization, they were isolated from outside contact for almost 1,000 years until their rediscovery by Portuguese sailors in the 14th century. The Canari more commonly referred to themselves as Guanches (men) a once civilized race that had slowly degenerated over millennia of interbreeding, while their level of society slid back, quite literally, into the caves...

Before their virtual elimination, some studies were made of the Guanches, a white people, fair complected and with red, auburn, and occasionally blond hair. Despite their genetically debased condition, they preserved traditions from long gone ages of civilized greatness and still gathered at the ruined stone monuments of their ancestors for special events. Some of these cyclopean walls, called tagora, survive as crumbling rectangular enclosures, circles, and even pyramids. .

The Afro-Asiatic language phylum has six distinct branches including Ancient Egyptian, which was known in its last years as Coptic, and which became extinct in the seventeenth century. The other five branches are Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic and Semitic.

The Semitic language group is subdivided into an extinct Eastern branch, Akkadian, spoken by Sargon, and a Western branch with two sub-branches, Central and South. The Central group consists of Aramaic, Canaanite, and Arabic. The Southern group consists of South Arabian and Ethiopic. And here is the curiosity: one of the other branches of the Afro-Asiatic language tree is Berber, with sub-branches of Guanche - spoken by the original Canary Islanders; East Numidian, which is Old Libyan, and Berber proper.

Now, you ask, what is the problem?

The Guanches and their language.

Some experts tell us that the Guanches must have come from the neighboring African coast long ages before the Black and Arab "invaders" overran it. We are informed that Mauritania was formerly inhabited by the "same ancient Iberian race which once covered all Western Europe: a people tall, fair and strong." Spain invaded, and most of the Guanches were wiped out by diseases to which they had no resistance due to their long isolation. It was over a hundred years before anyone attempted to record their language, customs, and what could be remembered of their history. Friar Alonso de Espinosa of the Augustine Order of Preachers, writing in 1580, tells us:

...It is generally believed that these are the Elysian Fields of which Homer sings. The poet Virgil, in the 4th book of the Aeneid, mentions the great peak of this island, when he makes Mercury, sent by Jupiter, go to Carthage to undeceive Aeneas, and to encourage him so that he might not abandon the voyage to Italy which he had undertaken.

It has not been possible to ascertain the origin of the Guanches, or whence they came, for as the natives had no letters, they had no account of their origin or descent, although some tradition may have come down from father to son. [...]

The old Guanches say that they have an immemorial tradition that sixty people came to this island, but they know not whence they came. They gave their settlement the name "The place of union of the son of the great one."

Although they knew of God, and called Him by various names, they had no rites nor ceremonies nor words with which they might venerate Him. [...] When the rains failed, they got together the sheep in certain places, where it was the custom to invoke the guardian of the sheep. Here they stuck a wand or lance in the ground, then they separated the lambs from the sheep, and placed the mothers round the lance, where they bleated. They believed that God was appeased by this ceremony, that he heard the bleating of the sheep and would send down the rain.

...They knew that there was a hell, and they held that it was in the peak of Teyde [the volcanic mountain}, and the devil was Guayota.

They were accustomed when a child was born, to call a woman whose duty it was, and she poured water over its head; and this woman thus contracted a relationship with the child's parents, so that it was not lawful to marry her, or to treat her dishonestly. They know not whence they derived this custom or ceremony, only that it existed. It could not be a sacrament, for it was not performed as one, nor had the evangelic law been preached to them.[...]

The inviolable law was that if a warrior meeting a woman by chance in the road, or in any solitary place, who spoke to her or looked at her, unless she spoke first and asked for something, or who, in an inhabited place, used any dishonest words which could be proved, he should suffer death for it without appeal. Such was their discipline. [...]

This people had very good and perfect features, and well-shaped bodies. They were of tall stature, with proportionate limbs. There were giants among them of incredible size...

They only possessed and sowed barley and beans. ... If they once had wheat, the seed had been lost... They also ate the flesh of sheep, goats, and pigs, and they fed on it by itself, without any other relish whatever... The flesh had to be half roasted because, as they said, it contained more substance in that way than if it was well roasted.

They counted the year by lunations... The lord did not marry with anyone of the lower orders, and if there was no one he could marry without staining the lineage, brothers were married to sisters.

They were wonderfully clever with counting. Although a flock was very numerous and came out of the yard or fold at a rush, they counted the sheep without opening their mouths or noting with their hands, and never made a mistake.

I'm sure that the reader can see that even though we have very little to go on, there are a couple of suggestive indicators recorded by the good friar. The first thing we note is the custom of driving a lance into the ground for the sheep to "call the god" which reminds us of a certain story in the Bible:

0:27 And Laban said unto him, I pray thee, if I have found favour in thine eyes, tarry: for I have learned by experience that the LORD hath blessed me for thy sake.
30:28 And he said, Appoint me thy wages, and I will give it.
30:29 And he said unto him, Thou knowest how I have served thee, and how thy cattle was with me.
30:30 For it was little which thou hadst before I came, and it is now increased unto a multitude; and the LORD hath blessed thee since my coming: and now when shall I provide for mine own house also? 30:31 And he said, What shall I give thee? And Jacob said, Thou shalt not give me any thing: if thou wilt do this thing for me, I will again feed and keep thy flock.
30:32 I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thence all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats: and of such shall be my hire.
30:33 So shall my righteousness answer for me in time to come, when it shall come for my hire before thy face: every one that is not speckled and spotted among the goats, and brown among the sheep, that shall be counted stolen with me.
30:34 And Laban said, Behold, I would it might be according to thy word.
30:35 And he removed that day the he goats that were ringstraked and spotted, and all the she goats that were speckled and spotted, and every one that had some white in it, and all the brown among the sheep, and gave them into the hand of his sons.
30:36 And he set three days' journey betwixt himself and Jacob: and Jacob fed the rest of Laban's flocks.
30:37 And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods.
30:38 And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.
30:39 And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.
30:40 And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban's cattle.
30:41 And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods.
30:42 But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the feebler were Laban's, and the stronger Jacob's.
30:43 And the man increased exceedingly, and had much cattle, and maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses.

Does this prove that the Guanches were familiar with the Hebrews and their Bible for those many thousands of years of isolation? That the relationship of their language to Berver, a sub-group of Semitic, proves the ancient history of the Hebres? Not exactly. Considered in context with all the other clues, it suggests that many of the stories in the Hebrew Bible were taken from much older stories, customs, and so on that actually belonged, as the Semitic language did, to an Aryan people, adopted by peoples we think of as ethnically "Semitic" in modern terms but who, in ancient terms, were not Semitic at all.

The languages spoken by many of the tribes of the Eurasian steppes, including the Turkic languages of the Khazars, are also known as Altaic. As a language family, this is still a bit contentious among experts. The Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic families do have strong similarities in many ways, but some linguists suggest these are due to intensive borrowing from long contact. To some extent, the Altaic-Turkic languages also resemble the Uralic languages already discussed, such as Finnish and Hungarian. As a consequence, a Ural-Altaic superfamily has been suggested: Eurasiatic, in which Indo-European languages would also be included as a "brother" language. This super-family has a parent also which makes a connect to Amerind languages, (!) but we won't go into that just now. The short of it is that we can't rely on language to denote a genetic or ethnic affinity over long periods of time, though it can, sometimes, be a clue.

 

[Laura]

Gog and Magon Reprise

Let's come back to our problem of Gog and Magog.

We note that the Frisians disappeared from the salt marshes and certainly, by the evidence of pottery, some of them went to England. How does this relate to the belief of the ancient Armenians and Georgians that the Khazars were "Gog and Magog."

In Genesis, we read:

10:1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. 10:2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. 10:3 And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. 10:4 And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. 10:5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

Notice the remark about "isles of the Gentiles."

In the passage from Ezekiel we notice several of the "sons of Japheth" being named as places:

38:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 38:2 Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him,
38:3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal...

Then later, he mentions the land of Magog is in the same breath with "them that dwell carelessly in the isles..."

39:6 And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles...

The only place on the planet that has been called Gog and Magog for any considerable length of time in our recorded history is in England: the Gog Magog hills near Cambridge. We notice immediately that England could definitely fit the description of the "isles of the Gentiles."

Historians suggest that the Gog Magog hills got their name because of the innumerable human bones that have been found there; evidence of a battle so fierce that it reminded the locals of Ezekiel's passage about Gog, king of Magog.

The earliest reference to this name for these hills is in a decree of 1574 forbidding students to visit them or be fined. Nowadays, they are still a trysting area. A map dating from the end of the 16th century also depicts the Gogmagog Hills.

There is a small problem with this explanation: How did the locals know about the prophecy of Ezekiel?

Well, they read the Bible, you say.

Did they?

John Wycliff's hand-written manuscripts in the 1380s were the first complete Bibles in the English language. They were obviously not widely available.

William Tyndale printed the first English New Testament in 1525/6. One risked death by burning if caught in mere possession of the forbidden book. Only two complete copies of that first printing are known to have survived. Any Edition printed before 1570 is very rare, most of them were confiscated and burned.

Myles Coverdale and John Rogers, assistants to Tyndale, carried the project forward. The first complete English Bible was printed on October 4, 1535, and is known as the Coverdale Bible.

Considering this timeline, it seems questionable that the locals around the Gogmagog hills should have give such a name to their hills, or that it would have become commonly known to everyone, such that a decree could be published regarding them in less than 40 years after the availability of the Bible. Considering the fact that having or reading the Bible was a crime for most of those 40 years, it is not likely that the local people would have wanted to reveal their knowledge of the name in this way. One would also think that if ancient battle sites were subject to being renamed in this fashion after the release of the English Bible, many other ancient battle sites would have received Biblical names as well. But they didn't.

Even though there is no proof, it seems to be highly probable that the Gogmagog hills were called that from more ancient times.

There are two figures of the giants Gog and Magog that strike the hours on a clock at Dunstan-n-the West, Fleet Street, but few people in London seem to know why they are there. Adrian Gilbert writes in his book, The New Jerusalem:

Once more we have to go back to Geoffrey of Monmouth's book, in which there is a story of how, when Brutus and his Trojans arrived in Britain, they found the island sparsley inhabited by a race of giants. One of these, called Gogmagog, wrestled with a Trojan hero called Corineus and was eventually thrown to his death from a cliff- top called in consequense 'Gogmagog's Leap'.

In the 1811 translation into English of Brut Tysilio, a Welsh version of the chronicles translated by the Rev. Peter Roberts, there is a footnote suggesting that Gogmagog is a corrupted form of Cawr-Madog, meaning 'Madog the great' or 'Madog the giant' in Welsh. It would appear that with Gog of Magog, the name of a war leader who the Bible prophesies will lead an invasion of the Holy Land at the end of the age.

In another version of the Gogmagog tale, the Recuyell des histories de Troye, Gog and Magog are two seperate giants. In this story they are not killed but brought back as slaves by Brutus to his city of New Troy. Here there were to be employed as gatekeepers, opening and closing the great gates of the palace.

The story of Gog and Magog, the paired giants who worked the gates of London, was very popular in the middle ages and effigies of them were placed on the city gates at least as early as the reign of Henry VI. These were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but so popular were they that new ones were made in 1708 and installed at the Guildhall. This pair of statues was destroyed in 1940 during the Blitz, the third great fire of London, when the roof and much of the interior furnishings of the Guildhall were burnt. A new pair of the statues was carved to replace them when the Guildhall was repaired after the war.

We should note that the dates of Henry VI are from well before the English Bible was available. The above indicates the existence of the name of Gog Magog in England long before the Bible was available to anyone.

The prophecies of Ezekiel are said to date from sometime around 695-690 BC, and we would like to consider the question as to where he heard the term "Gog, Magog" and what terrible battle was fought in the past that was used as a model for Ezekiel's prediction to which this name was attached?

Gogmagon, Armageddon and the Trojan War

As it happens, there are three terms often associated with archetypal battles: Armageddon (Megiddo), Gog Magog, and the Trojan War.

Those of you who have read Who Wrote the Bible will recall that the untimely death of the hero - King Josiah - occurred in the valley of Megiddo and that was the end of the story. Note also that this tale is a doublet of the story of the death of King Ahab who was of "The House of David."

Megiddo also features in the story of the deaths of the sons of Ahab found in II Kings, chapter 9. This chapter chronicles the death of Jezebel as well. The reason I mention these odd little semi-mythical connections is because I am persuaded that careful examination of Biblical texts compared to many other sources, including hard scientific ones, can assist us in forming at least a vague picture of our true history and this may include the fact that some of the stories of the Old Testament are borrowed from the history of the Northern Peoples, mythicized, and then re-historicized with new names and genealogies added to create the Bible, the so-called "History of the Jews." Those stories did not come into existence in a vacuum and could not have been foisted on the people if there wasn't something in them that resonated with ancient memories handed down orally.

Another point: right away, we notice a homophonic similarity between Megiddo and Magog but is there any kind of connection between Gog, Magog, Troy and Britain? Do these three wars, Armageddon, Gog Magog, and Troy have anything in common that connects us to England?

Well, it's possible. Let's take a look at a startling theory.

 

[Laura]

Where Troy Once Stood

The story of the Trojan War is, in Western Civilization, the greatest non-religious story ever told. It has haunted the western imagination for over three thousand years. "In Troy there lies the scene," Shakespeare said.

The story of Troy is at the bedrock of Western Culture from Homer to Virgil, From Chaucer to Shakespeare to Berlioz to Yeats. We talk about "Trojan Horses" and "Achilles Heels" and go on Odysseys and "work like Trojans" and on and on.

The tales of Achilles and Hector, Helen and Paris, and so many other great heroes all assembled into one story have lured a constant stream of pilgrims to the assumed region of Troy for all of that three thousand years; from Alexander the Great to Lord Byron to Heinrich Schliemann, the alleged discoverer of "Troy." The British queen is referred to as the seed of Priam, and it was the fantasy of the Nazis to become the new Achaians, comparing Hitler with Achilles.

Troy has come to stand for all cities because of one tragic event: the siege and destruction and death of all its heroes - all because of a woman. Herodotus tells us that the Trojan War is the root of the enmity between Europe and Asia.

Homer is the starting point of our search for Troy. The Iliad deals with one episode of the war, a few weeks in the tenth year; a small fragment of the vast cycle of stories that dealt with the Trojan War. In classical times a series of epics now only available in fragments, or lost completely, told the rest of the story, drawing on a long and venerable tradition.

The hold that the legend of Troy had on the Greek imagination was such that, based on the story of a violation of Athena's altar at Troy by Ajax of Lokris, the people of Lokris each year sent selected daughters to expiate this sin of their ancestor. They suffered indignities willingly, and it was said that the Trojans had the right to kill them. They lived out their days as slaves, in confinement and poverty. This custom continued into the 1st century AD as a testimony to the potency of the legend of Troy.

In the ancient world, it was uniformly believed that the Trojan War was a historical event. Anaxagoras was one of the few who doubted it because he said there was no proof. Herodotus, in the 5th century BC, inquired of the Egyptian priests as to whether or not the Greek version of the story was true, that is, did they have an alternative record of it, since there were no written records before Homer committed it to writing. We will return to Herodotus' account from the Egyptians later.

Based on the work of Homer, around 400 BC, Thucydides constructed a "history" of prehistoric Greece. No one knows how much of this was based on deductions from Homer, or derived from other sources that we no longer have. Thucydides wrote:

We have no record of any action taken by Hellas as a whole before the Trojan War. Indeed, my view is that at this time the whole country was not even called Hellas... The best evidence for this can be found in Homer, who, though he was born much later than the time of the Trojan War, nowhere uses the name "Hellenic" for the whole force.

Thucydides tried to deal with the problem of a story of a great clash of forces that seemed to be contradicted by the evidence of the small sites and relatively primitive nature of the region where Troy was supposed to be. He tells us that, as far as he knew, Mycenaea had always been a village without great importance, while Homer referred to it as a "town with broad streets."

...Many of the towns of that period do not seem to us today to be particularly imposing: yet that is not good evidence for rejecting what the poets and what general tradition have to say about the size of the expedition ... we have no right therefore to judge cities by their appearances rather than by their actual power and there is no reason whey we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that ever took place.

So it was that, even in the 5th century BC, Thucydides has commented on the fact that the only evidence for the Trojan War is the words of poets and "general tradition." The fact is, many present day scholars doubt the existence of a "Mycenaean empire" because the archaeological evidence simply does not support the claims of the story.

Yet, the detailed nature of the descriptions incorporated into the work of Homer suggest that the original works were composed by eye witnesses of a significant conflict. The question that plagues us is: where did that conflict actually take place?

The problem that faces the scholars is this: if you were to remove the place names and read the Iliad, you would not think that the writer was talking about the Mediterranean. The text talks about tides, salty, dark, misty seas and a climate of rain, fog and snow. The tall, long-haired warriors traveling overseas in "symmetrical" ships "eager to kill their enemies" remind us more of the Vikings than the Greeks of the classical era. Several of the commanders in the story had Viking-like honorific titles: "Sacker of Cities." It even seems that, since the Greeks themselves could hardly imagine the behavior of these people in the stories, they consigned them to a "heroic age" and some of them to semi-divinity. At the same time this was being done, perhaps the Hebrews were assimilating some of these stories to their own "history," adding genealogies and giving themselves a lineage that was totally fabricated.

The Greek text of the Iliad speaks of "ceaseless rains" in the Trojan plain. The adjective is "athesphatos" which means "what even god cannot measure." Such rains are certainly typical of the climate of Northern Europe, but most definitely not typical of Greece or the Mediterranean.

Iman J. Wilkens was intrigued by all of these problems as a schoolboy in Holland. He knew that he was reading a description of an environment much like his own, and not like that of the sunny south. He wondered: could the climate of the Mediterranean have changed so much since then? But even that wouldn't explain the tides or the fact that Homer had placed Troy near to Lesbos and the Hellespont, from which Crete and Egypt are just a few days voyage by boat. That, of course, raised a question about the Odyssey: how could Ulysses have possibly gotten so terribly lost in the Mediterranean where nearly everything is just a day or two sail away?

The experts answer that Homer's work was obviously just a fantasized version of a historical seed event.

We certainly know that the written versions of the Iliad and Odyssey originated in Greece, but do we know for sure that the oral version was about Greece as we know it today? When we consider the evidence of Lev Gumilev, do we know that the people of Greece today are the people of Greece in the time of the Odyssey? Just as languages can be adopted, so can myths.

Thucydides noted certain anomalies in Homer's text that may give us a clue. He was surprised that Homer never used the word "barbarian" for foreigners or non-Greeks.

More than this, Thucydides remarks that barbarians were living in various parts of Greece and names the Taulentians "of the Illyrian race" living on the shores of the Ionian Gulf. From classical mythology, we know that a certain Galatea had three sons: Galas, Celtus and Illyrius, who founded the three major Celtic peoples: the Gauls, the Celts and the Illyrians. Professor Henry Hubert hypothesized that the ancient Greeks had been in contact with Celtic culture through the intermediary of the Illyrians, which seems to be confirmed by Thucydides remark. What if, during this contact, they received the epics sung by the bards and began to give the place names in the stories to their own settlements? In the manner of mythicization that I have described in The Secret History of the World, the Greeks might then begin to believe that the Trojan War had been fought by their own ancestors against an overseas kingdom. One thing is clear from comparing the stories in the Bible to the Greek legends, those stories must have been quite popular everywhere in those days.

There is still another issue. Wilkens writes:

Quite apart from the difficulty of fitting most places described in the Iliad and the Odyssey into the physical reality of the lands surrounding the Aegean Sea, there is also a problem with the spiritual content of Homer's works. Plato had doubts as to their Greek origin and the great philosopher was by no means an admirer of this imaginative poet whose gods, with their jealousies and vengeances, behaved like spoilt children. Plato was particularly worried about the corrupting influence of Homer's poems on the minds of Greek youth, above all because of their "lack of respect" for the gods. He suggested that certain passages of the Iliad and Odyssey should be corrected or even expurgated and if he had been the dictator of his "ideal state," he would have had them burned, thus breaking the chain of transmission of these unique and extremely ancient poems. [...]

Reading the text [of the Iliad and the Odyssey] with an atlas of Greece on one's knees, it is hard to understand the descriptions of many places, or the distances between places, or the sailing directions, or how it was possible to travel or drift in a boat with a head wind. In short, the place names in Greece, the pieces of the puzzle, seem completely jumbled. Once these names are sought in Western Europe, however - and about 90 percent of them can still be found there, far more than in Greece - all the pieces of the puzzle fall perfectly into place and the events described by Homer become entirely logical and comprehensible. [...]

I am certainly not the first to have the impression that the Trojan War must have taken place in Western Europe. As early as 1790, Wernsdorf thought that the stories about the Cimmerians, one of the peoples mentioned by Homer, were of Celtic origin. He had a very precise reason for this: the classical Greek author Aelian mentions them in connection with the "singing" swan, Cygnus musicus, which is found in the British Isles and northern Europe, whereas Greece and the rest of Southern Europe knew only the "silent" swan, Cygnus olor.

In 1804, M. H. Vosz believed that the Odyssey most probably described certain landscapes in the British Isles and, in 1806, C.J. de Grave arrived at the general conclusion that the historical and mythical background of Homer's works should be sought not in Greece but in western Europe. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Th. Cailleux wrote that Odysseus adventures had taken place in the Atlantic, starting from Troy, which by a process of deduction he concluded to be near Cambridge in England.

Near Cambridge in England? The Gogmagog hills?

In other words, Wilkens is proposing that there has been a transfer of western European geographical names to the eastern Mediterranean. He suggests that this occurred very late, about 1,000 BC. My guess is that it began much earlier, after the collapse of the Bronze Age Civilization around 1600 BC at the same time that another famous "love triangle" was changing history: Akhenaten and Nefertiti/Sarai and Abraham/Moses; we wonder if there is a connection?

With the exception of the Bible, no other works of western literature have been more studied and commented upon than the Iliad and the Odyssey. Considering the fact that the prophet Ezekiel knew the name of a place in England and wrote a description of a battle that certainly appears to be a very early assimilation to the story of Troy, perhaps the Bible and the Iliad have a lot more in common than one would ordinarily suppose? I would like to quote a couple of sections from my book, The Secret History of The World, to give us some additional clues:

Stonehenge and Troy

Gildas, writing in the sixth century AD, is the first native British writer whose works have come down to us. Nennius, writing about 200 years later, refers to "the traditions of our elders." And Geoffrey of Monmouth praises the works of Gildas and Bede and wonders at the lack of other works about the early kings of Britain saying:

Yet the deeds of these men were such that they deserve to be praised for all time. What is more, these deeds were handed joyfully down in oral tradition, just as if they had been committed to writing, by many peoples who had only their memory to rely on.

Perhaps they were; in the Iliad and Odyssey?

In describing the fifty or so years preceding his account of Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us about Vortigern and the arrival of the Saxons under the leadership of Hengest and Horsa. Present throughout these events is the presence of Merlin - the British equivalent of Hiram Abiff and Daedalus combined: the great architects of ancient times playing side-kick to Solomon and Minos respectively. We are also reminded of the unification of Egypt by Narmer, also known as Menes, who also built a great temple to Ptah, who Herodotus and others say was Hephaestus, the volcano/fire god.

What we are interested in here is the fact that Merlin was credited with building Stonehenge. For some reason, based on the "oral tradition," Geoffrey of Monmouth connected the mysterious and legendary figure of Merlin to the prehistoric monument on the Salisbury plain. The question then is not about the accuracy of Geoffrey's history, but why he made this connection? Was it based on stories in the traditions that he had mentioned and considered to be reliable?

The Stonehenge story told by Geoffrey of Monmouth begins with a treacherous massacre of the Britons by Hengest and his Saxons, which took place at a peace conference. The Saxons hid their daggers in their shoes and, at a signal from their leader, drew them and killed all the assembled British nobles except the king. Geoffrey tells us that the meeting took place at the "Cloister of Ambrius, not far from Kaercaradduc, which is now called Salisbury." He later describes this as a monastery of three hundred brethren founded by Ambrius many years before.

As it happens, there is a place called Amesbury about two and a half miles east of Stonehenge, which was originally called Ambresbyrig. This site in no way matches the description of the Cloister of Ambrius. The cloister is described as situated on Mount Ambrius, whereas Amesbury is in the valley of the river Avon. Geoffrey tells us that the victims of the massacre were buried in the cemetery beside the monastery, not two and a half miles away. What is more, since it seems that Geoffrey was acting under the pressure of the mythical norm of assimilating current events to the archetype, we then are left free to consider the possibility that this was the site of an ancient and famous massacre and that Stonehenge and the Cloister of Ambrius are one and the same. More than that, we can consider the story of the betrayal at the peace conference to be quite similar to the idea of the "Trojan Horse."

The fact that Geoffrey called the place a "cloister" is a curious choice of words since a cloister is "a covered arcade forming part of a religious or collegiate establishment." Stonehenge could very easily have been a "covered cloister" when it was intact and in use. Geoffrey may also have been trying to "Christianize" Stonehenge in his references to monastery and monks though, a combination of religion and collegialism was part of the Druidic tradition.

The Saxons gave Stonehenge the name by which we know it today. The Britons called it the Giant's Dance, and Geoffrey certainly had a tradition to draw on there if he had wanted to since he begins his history with the adventures of Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, who, after much traveling and fighting, landed on Britain, which was uninhabited except for a few giants. Geoffrey had a reasonable context here in which to place Stonehenge, but he ignored it and instead attributed the building of Stonehenge to Merlin after the dreadful massacre by the Saxons. This enabled him to connect his Arthur to the great architect of the monument and all its glories. This suggests to us that there was a solid tradition behind this idea: that Stonehenge was the focal point of a people who had suffered a terrible, terminal disaster. In short, this tradition may reach back into the mists of antiquity.

As W. A. Cummins, geologist and archaeologist remarks, Geoffrey's tale sounds like a pre-medieval tradition about Stonehenge, possibly even prehistoric, pointing out that Geoffrey was eight and a half centuries closer to the event than we are, so maybe his account is correspondingly closer?

Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, gives us a description of Britain based, in part, on the account of the voyage of Pytheas of Massilia, who sailed around Britain in 300 BC.

As for the inhabitants, they are simple and far removed from the shrewdness and vice which characterize our day. Their way of living is modest, since they are well clear of the luxury that is begotten of wealth. The island is also thickly populated and its climate is extremely cold, as one would expect, since it actually lies under the Great Bear. It is held by many kings and potentates, who for the most part live at peace among themselves.

Diodorus tells a fascinating story about an island, thought to be Britain, that was obviously of legendary character already when he was writing:

Of those who have written about the ancient myths, Hecateus and certain others say that in the regions beyond the land of the Celts (Gaul) there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. This island, the account continues, is situated in the north, and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are called by that name because their home is beyond the point whence the north wind blows; and the land is both fertile and productive of every crop, and since it has an unusually temperate climate it produces two harvests each year.

This reminds us of the passage in Ezekiel where he mentions the land of Magog in the same breath with "them that dwell carelessly in the isles..."

39:6 And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles...

Why should people in the "isles of the gentiles" be described as living carelessly? Is that "carelessly" as in "without cares," or is it carelessly as in not taking sufficient care in some way that led to an incident in which such carelessness became a "marker" for these people? Perhaps a famous blunder of some sort? A peace conference that went terribly wrong? A "Trojan Horse" at the end of a protracted war? A war being fought as a Volcano in the Mediterranean was about to erupt and change the climate of the planet for many years to come? A volcano that erupted at the same time that a strange drama including a "love triangle" was taking place in the land we now know as Egypt?

Now, it seems that there is little doubt that Diodorus is describing the same location, but we notice that the climate is so vastly different in the two descriptions that we can hardly make the connection. However, let us just suppose that his description of Britain was based on the climate that prevailed at the time he was writing, and the legendary description of the Hyperboreans was based on a previous climatic condition that was preserved in the story. Diodorus stresses that he is recounting something very ancient as he goes on to say:

The Hyperboreans also have a language, we are informed, which is peculiar to them, and are most friendly disposed towards the Greeks, and especially towards the Athenians and the Delians, who have inherited this goodwill from most ancient times. The myth also relates that certain Greeks visited the Hyperboreans and left behind them costly votive offerings bearing inscriptions in Greek letters. And in the same way Abaris, a Hyperborean, came to Greece in ancient times and renewed the goodwill and kinship of his people to the Delians.

Diodorus remark about the relations between the Hyperboreans and the Athenians triggers in our minds the memory of the remarks of Plato about the war between the "Atlanteans" and the "Athenians" and we are brought back again to the idea of Troy and the mythicization of history. We wonder if the Hyperboreans are the original Athenians" who may have fled the island at the time of the collapse of the Bronze Age at which time the climate all over the planet was affected. After all, the Greeks are said to be "Sons of the North Wind," Boreas. Herodotus expounds upon the relationship of the Hyperboreans to the Delians:

Certain sacred offerings wrapped up in wheat straw come from the Hyperboreans into Scythia, whence they are taken over by the neighbouring peoples in succession until they get as far west as the Adriatic: from there they are sent south, and the first Greeks to receive them are the Dodonaeans. Then, continuing southward, they reach the Malian gulf, cross to Euboea, and are passed on from town to town as far as Carystus. Then they skip Andros, the Carystians take them to Tenos, and the Tenians to Delos. That is how these things are said to reach Delos at the present time.

So, we have another connection to the Scythians. The legendary connection between the Hyperboreans and the Delians leads us to another interesting remark of Herodotus who tells us that Leto, the mother of Apollo, was born on the island of the Hyperboreans. That there was regular contact between the Greeks and the Hyperboreans over many centuries does not seem to be in doubt. The Hyperboreans were said to have introduced the Greeks to the worship of Apollo, but it is just as likely that the relationship goes much further back. Yes, this is contrary to the idea that culture flowed from south to north, but that's where the clues lead!

Herodotus mentions at another point, when discussing the lands of the "barbarians," "All these except the Hyperboreans, were continually encroaching upon one another's territory." Without putting words in Herodotus' mouth, it seems to suggest that the Hyperboreans were not warlike at all.

A further clue about the religion of the Hyperboreans comes from the myths of Orpheus. It is said that when Dionysus invaded Thrace, Orpheus "did not see fit to honor him but instead preached the evils of sacrificial murder to the men of Thrace." He taught "other sacred mysteries" having to do with Apollo, whom he believed to be the greatest of all gods. Dionysus became so enraged; he set the Maenads on Orpheus at Apollo's temple where Orpheus was a priest. They burst in, murdered their husbands who were assembled to hear Orpheus speak, tore Orpheus limb from limb, and threw his head into the river Hebrus where it floated downstream still singing. It was carried on the sea to the island of Lesbos. Another version of the story is that Zeus killed Orpheus with a thunderbolt for divulging divine secrets. He was responsible for instituting the Mysteries of Apollo in Thrace, Hecate in Aegina, and Subterrene Demeter at Sparta. And this brings us to a further revelation of Diodorus regarding the Hyperboreans:

And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple, which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. Furthermore, a city is there which is sacred to this god, and the majority of its inhabitants are players on the cithara; and these continually play on this instrument in the temple and sing hymns of praise to the god, glorifying his deeds...

They say also that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished, and for this reason the Greeks call the nineteen-year period the "year of Meton". At the time of this appearance of the god he both plays on the cithara and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades, expressing in this manner his delight in his successes. And the kings of this city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreades, since they are descendants of Boreas, and the succession to these positions is always kept in their family.

When considering the idea of the god "dancing all night" in the round temple of the Hyperboreans, our mind naturally turns to that most remarkable of incidents in the Bible where David - the great harpist - danced before the Ark of the Covenant - in his underwear, no less!

I would like to note also how similar the above story of the Maenads murdering their husbands is to the story of the daughters of Danaus murdering their husbands - sons of Aegyptus - on the wedding night, and how similar both of these stories are to the story of the massacre at the Cloisters of Ambrius attributed still later to Hengist and Horsa. The story of the Maenads adds the spin that it was a religious dispute between sacrificers and those preaching against the evils of sacrifice. Additionally, it is interesting that in the stories of the daughters of Danaeus and the Maenads, women have become as deadly as treacherous Helen was to Troy and certainly as deadly as Nefertiti apparently was to Egypt.

Was an original legend later adapted to a different usage, assimilated to a different group or tribe? More than once?

In fact, when you think about it, the stories in the Bible are remarkably similar to the Greek myths with most of the fantastic elements removed, names changed, and genealogies inserted to give the impression of a long history. One could say that the "history" of the Old Testament is merely "historicized myth." And of course, the myths that it was historicized from may have belonged to an entirely different people.

 

[Laura]

Josephus: Apologist or Traitor?

Now, let us come back and consider the story of the true history of the Exodus that was alleged to have been found in the tomb of King Tut. We know that the oldest extant Hebrew version of the Old Testament - the Torah and the Prophets and other books - dates only to about the time of the heyday of the Khazar kingdom. We even suspect that the Khazar revival of Judaism is mostly responsible for the texts we now know as the Torah. We know that Mainmonides wrote at about the same time. We know that most of the so-called Jewish Talmud also emerged at this time, as well as the Kaballah and other alleged ancient "traditions".

Prior to that, we know that the writing of some - very few - of the books of the Bible that we know to have been extant prior to the tenth century AD were written down at about the same time that Homer is said to have written the Iliad and Odyssey. One can notice striking similarities between certain Greek myths and stories in the Bible. Many people assume that this is because the Greeks borrowed from the Jews. But what if it was the other way around? What if the Greek myths were "mythicized history" that was then taken and "historicized" and mixed in with actual chronicles that were otherwise not terribly exciting, and transformed into a "History of the Jews," complete with genealogies added to give it credibility?

One of our main sources of information about ancient Jewish history, outside of the Bible, is Josephus who became known, in his capacity as a Roman citizen, as Flavius Josephus. Josephus was a first century Jewish historian and apologist of priestly and royal ancestry who survived and recorded the Destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. His works do give us important insights into first-century Judaism because that is when he lived. The question is: can we rely on him for Jewish history any further back than the Second Temple period (if that)?

Josephus was constantly writing contentious pieces claiming the extreme antiquity of the Jews and Jewish culture and trying to argue for its compatibility with cultured Graeco-Roman thought. Reading his works elicits the feeling that "he protests too much."

Josephus' twenty-one volume Antiquities of the Jews reads like a synopsis of the Old Testament. The fact is, the Old Testament could as easily have been written based on Josephus as vice versa! His claim was that various persons had asked him to give an account of Jewish culture and -as noted - Antiquities of the Jews amounts to little more than the Bible stories woven around the many philosophical debates current in Rome at that time as well as repeated insistence on the "Antiquity of the Jews" as well as their "universal significance" to all people. It could be said that the whole "chosen people out of all the nations" shtick originated with Josephus. He claims that Abraham taught science to the Egyptians who in turn taught the Greeks; that Moses set up a senatorial priestly aristocracy which, like that of Rome, resisted monarchy. All the great figures of the Bible are presented as ideal philosophers and leaders.

Plato On Atlantis

Here we want to stop and consider the alternate claim that had existed since the time of Plato, that the "ancient Greeks" were the ones who taught science to the Egyptians.

Timaeus and Critias, written by Plato some time around 360 BC are the only existing written records which specifically refer to Atlantis - a story of a great and terrible war. The dialogues are conversations between Socrates, Hermocrates, Timaeus, and Critias. Apparently in response to a prior talk by Socrates about ideal societies, Timaeus and Critias agree to entertain Socrates with a tale that is "not a fiction but a true story."

The story is about the conflict between the ancient Athenians and the Atlanteans 9000 years before Plato's time. Knowledge of the ancient times was apparently forgotten by the Athenians of Plato's day, and the form the story of Atlantis took in Plato's account was that Egyptian priests conveyed it to Solon. Solon passed the tale to Dropides, the great-grandfather of Critias; Critias learned of it from his grandfather also named Critias, son of Dropides. Let's take a careful look at the main section of the story, omitting the introduction that describes Solon going to Egypt and chatting up the priests.

Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science, which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why.

There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Phaeton, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us.

When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient. The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed - if there were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old, and are preserved in our temples.

We want to here make note of the fact that present day evidence suggests that - contrary to what the Egyptian priest above is saying - Egypt has been inundated and that it has - in the distant past - experienced a rainy climate. This leads us to question of whether or not this story being told by a real Egyptian priest of the Egypt we now know as Egypt? If it were about the Egypt we now know as Egypt, and if he had the knowledge of ancient Egypt that he is presented as having, then he would have known of the period of heavy rain and shallow seas in Egypt, by which the Sphinx and other monuments were eroded, and which deposited a layer of salt on the interior of the pyramids and other structures. And so we suggest, to reconcile this difficulty, not that the story is false, but rather that the dialogue is exactly as it is presented, but that the tellers of the story were fully aware that there was a more ancient Egypt that was not the Egypt of the pharaohs that we know as Egypt today and that this was even commonly known at the time.

Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children.

In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven.

Again, let's interrupt the dialogue to point out that it is hardly likely that a priest of Egypt - as we know Egypt today - would have declared the Athenians to be "the fairest and noblest race of men," nor that they "performed the noblest deeds" and had the "fairest constitution ... under the face of heaven!" This is completely contrary to what we know about the historical Egyptians. Is this another clue that the speaker is giving us that it is not a priest of the Egypt we now know as Egypt?

Solon marveled at his words, and earnestly requested the priests to inform him exactly and in order about these former citizens. You are welcome to hear about them, Solon, said the priest, both for your own sake and for that of your city, and above all, for the sake of the goddess who is the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She founded your city a thousand years before ours, receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be eight thousand years old.

Yet again, the Egyptian priest is giving greater antiquity to the Greeks than to the Egyptians! Another clue for the reader to understand that this is not an Egyptian story from Egypt as we know it today! Indeed, the worship of the goddess, is the older form of worship in Egypt. But all of that came to an end, probably with the conquest of Narmer, the building of the temple to Hephaestus, the demoting of the goddess and the Moon calendar, and the instituting of the Solar worship and the solar calendar of 365 days.

As touching your citizens of nine thousand years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time.

Here, of course, we come to the idea that there was an ancient connection and communication between the true "old Egyptians" and the Northern peoples. Georges Gurdjieff once remarked that Christianity was taken from Egypt, a statement that might suggest that he agreed with the Pan-Egyptian school. But no: Christianity, he hastened to explain, was not taken from the Egypt of history, but from a "far older Egypt" which is unrecorded.

In the first place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is the class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of husbandmen; and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are distinct from all the other classes, and are commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to military pursuits; moreover, the weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style of equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in your part of the world first to you.

The "classes" that are described here are very close to what are known from the most ancient of times as the Aryan class system that was imposed on India after the Aryan invasions about 1500 BC, and continues to be a powerful influence in Indian society.

The remark that the right function of society was "first taught to the Asiatics" is most interesting. The reference to "Asiatics" in this context from an historical "Egyptian Priest" is extremely questionable because Asiatics were referred to by the real Egyptian priest, Manetho, as "vile." Nevertheless, even in historical times, it is indeed true that the Egyptians borrowed their military equipment and war strategies from the Asiatics, the Hyksos. The issue of who the "vile Asiatics" were is an ongoing debate, but it seems to devolve on such as the Hittites, Hyksos, and other Indo-European tribes that came down from the Steppes in various waves.

Then as to wisdom, do you observe how our law from the very first made a study of the whole order of things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which gives health, out of these divine elements deriving what was needful for human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones, and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children and disciples of the gods.

Again and again, this very strange "Egyptian" priest is saying things that completely contradict the more "historical" Egyptian view that they are the most "ancient and noble race." In the above remarks, he has said that the goddess imparted to the Greeks first all of the laws of health and those things needed to preserve and prolong life. The Greeks are pronounced to have been the "wisest of men," and those "most like the goddess" herself. And again "excelled all mankind in all virtue," which is not very likely to have been said by an Egyptian priest.

We are going to skip the part of the text that deals with Atlantis as a great empire that came from across the Atlantic Ocean to make war against the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and how the Greeks stood against them and defeated them. Now is neither the time nor place to discuss whether or not such an empire existed 9000 years before the time of Plato . What we are interested in is the idea that was being discussed as though it were common knowledge, that there was a place called "Egypt" that is not what we currently know as Egypt. We are also interested in this story in relation to the events surrounding the collapse of the Bronze Age which has been definitively linked to the eruption of the Volcano Thera on the island of Santorini. It is highly likely that a great culture existed in Western Europe prior to the collapse of the Bronze Age and that the freezing temperatures that fell upon the earth after the eruption of Thera drove all these peoples East into Asia and South, into the Mediterranean areas, bringing their stories and culture and the names of their countries and cities with them. The idea that all of this occurred either as a great war was in progress, or just after is suggested in the text by Plato:

But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

Again, whether or not there was such an event 9000 years before Plato and a later event does not concern us here. What we are concerned with is the possible oral tradition of the Trojan War fought near the Gogmagog hills in Britain.

I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard from Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale which I have just been repeating to you came into my mind, and I remarked with astonishment how, by some mysterious coincidence, you agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed, and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak.

Here we find another interesting clue. Critias has just told us that Socrates was discussing the very things that are included in this story - that everything Socrates had been saying the previous day "agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon." Apparently, this story had been handed down via another line of transmission.

And so I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering that in all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale suitable to our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well provided. And therefore, as Hermocrates has told you, on my way home yesterday I at once communicated the tale to my companions as I remembered it; and after I left them, during the night by thinking I recovered nearly the whole it. Truly, as is often said, the lessons of our childhood make wonderful impression on our memories; for I am not sure that I could remember all the discourse of yesterday, but I should be much surprised if I forgot any of these things which I have heard very long ago. I listened at the time with childlike interest to the old man's narrative; he was very ready to teach me, and I asked him again and again to repeat his words, so that like an indelible picture they were branded into my mind.

As soon as the day broke, I rehearsed them as he spoke them to my companions, that they, as well as myself, might have something to say. And now, Socrates, to make an end my preface, I am ready to tell you the whole tale. I will give you not only the general heads, but the particulars, as they were told to me.

The city and citizens, which you yesterday described to us in fiction, we will now transfer to the world of reality. It shall be the ancient city of Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens whom you imagined, were our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest spoke; they will perfectly harmonise, and there will be no inconsistency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these ancient Athenians. Let us divide the subject among us, and all endeavour according to our ability gracefully to execute the task which you have imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is suited to the purpose, or whether we should seek for some other instead.

And we come to the final understanding that conveys to us the secret of the story of Atlantis: that it did not actually come from an Egyptian priest of the Egypt we know today, but that this was a story that was created to "execute the task which you [Socrates] have imposed upon us," which was to veil in fiction something that was Truth. Does this mean that they were "making it up"? No, indeed. It means that they were attempting to find a vehicle for the history that would insure its preservation.

In any event, this dialogue was quite familiar in the time of Josephus who then decided to claim an antiquity and role for the Jews that simply has never been supported in the archaeological record and considering the nature of Josephus himself, it is altogether likely that he created his fiction to give himself status.

Josephus was a contradiction. He presented himself as a devout Jew; his people as civilized, devout and philosophical, but he was never able to justify his own actions during the Jewish war. Many have asked the question why, for example, he did not commit suicide in Galilee in 67 AD with his compatriots; why, after his capture, he cooperated with the Roman invaders?

Many have viewed Josephus as a traitor and informer and this has led to questions about his credibility as a historian. I think we all have encountered people like Josephus: cowards and traitors due to weakness and not necessarily meanness. And ever afterward, they try to "make it up" to those they know they have betrayed as well as to justify themselves. So, I think we can accept his descriptions of customs and certain ordinary matters, but we most definitely must be aware that anything he wrote about Jewish history or the events of the Jewish War are undoubtedly subjected to that particular spin of the guilty trying to make amends and trying to "buy their way" into being accepted not only by those they have betrayed, but by those they betrayed them to who certainly know that anyone who betrays his own will betray everyone.

 

[Laura]

Against Apion

Josephus' work Against Apion is another two-volume methinks-he-protests-too-much defense of Judaism as a classical religion and philosophy, again stressing the antiquity of Judaism against what Josephus claimed was the relatively more recent traditions of the Greeks. Some anti-Judean allegations ascribed by Josephus to the Greek writer Apion, and stories about the "truth of the Exodus" accredited to Manetho are quoted and denied as false.

Well, at this point, considering the fact that the Truth about the Exodus that was buried with King Tut was so damaging to the claims of the Jews to Israel that it was suppressed despite its enormous historical significance, I think we can figure out that Josephus' claims were more along the line of propaganda and apologia than truth. What's more, we are now more interested than ever in what Manetho had to say about the early history of the Jews. Thankfully Josephus saw fit to quote Manetho even if it was only to argue against what he had to say.

Against Apion

14. I shall begin with the writings of the Egyptians; not indeed of those that have written in the Egyptian language, which it is impossible for me to do. But Manetho was a man who was by birth an Egyptian, yet had he made himself master of the Greek learning, as is very evident; for he wrote the history of his own country in the Greek tongue, by translating it, as he saith himself, out of their sacred records; he also finds great fault with Herodotus for his ignorance and false relations of Egyptian affairs.

Now this Manetho, in the second book of his Egyptian History, writes concerning us [Jews] in the following manner. I will set down his very words, as if I were to bring the very man himself into a court for a witness:

"There was a king of ours whose name was Timaus. Under him it came to pass, I know not how, that God was averse to us, and there came, after a surprising manner, men of ignoble birth out of the eastern parts, and had boldness enough to make an expedition into our country, and with ease subdued it by force, yet without our hazarding a battle with them.

So when they had gotten those that governed us under their power, they afterwards burnt down our cities, and demolished the temples of the gods, and used all the inhabitants after a most barbarous manner; nay, some they slew, and led their children and their wives into slavery.

At length they made one of themselves king, whose name was Salatis; he also lived at Memphis, and made both the upper and lower regions pay tribute, and left garrisons in places that were the most proper for them. He chiefly aimed to secure the eastern parts, as fore-seeing that the Assyrians, who had then the greatest power, would be desirous of that kingdom, and invade them; and as he found in the Saite Nomos, [Sethroite,] a city very proper for this purpose, and which lay upon the Bubastic channel, but with regard to a certain theologic notion was called Avaris, this he rebuilt, and made very strong by the walls he built about it, and by a most numerous garrison of two hundred and forty thousand armed men whom he put into it to keep it. Thither Salatis came in summer time, partly to gather his corn, and pay his soldiers their wages, and partly to exercise his armed men, and thereby to terrify foreigners.

When this man had reigned thirteen years, after him reigned another, whose name was Beon, for forty-four years; after him reigned another, called Apachnas, thirty-six years and seven months; after him Apophis reigned sixty-one years, and then Janins fifty years and one month; after all these reigned Assis forty-nine years and two months. And these six were the first rulers among them, who were all along making war with the Egyptians, and were very desirous gradually to destroy them to the very roots.

This whole nation was styled Hycsos, that is, Shepherd-kings: for the first syllable Hyc, according to the sacred dialect, denotes a king, as is Sos a shepherd; but this according to the ordinary dialect; and of these is compounded Hycsos: but some say that these people were Arabians."

[But Manetho goes on]:

"These people, whom we have before named kings, and called shepherds also, and their descendants," as he says, "kept possession of Egypt five hundred and eleven years."

After these, he says,

"That the kings of Thebais and the other parts of Egypt made an insurrection against the shepherds, and that there a terrible and long war was made between them."

He says further,

"That under a king, whose name was Alisphragmuthosis, the shepherds were subdued by him, and were indeed driven out of other parts of Egypt, but were shut up in a place that contained ten thousand acres; this place was named Avaris."

Manetho says,

"That the shepherds built a wall round all this place, which was a large and a strong wall, and this in order to keep all their possessions and their prey within a place of strength, but that Thummosis the son of Alisphragmuthosis made an attempt to take them by force and by siege, with four hundred and eighty thousand men to lie rotund about them, but that, upon his despair of taking the place by that siege, they came to a composition with them, that they should leave Egypt, and go, without any harm to be done to them, whithersoever they would; and that, after this composition was made, they went away with their whole families and effects, not fewer in number than two hundred and forty thousand, and took their journey from Egypt, through the wilderness, for Syria; but that as they were in fear of the Assyrians, who had then the dominion over Asia, they built a city in that country which is now called Judea, and that large enough to contain this great number of men, and called it Jerusalem.

Now Manetho, in another book of his, says,

"That this nation, thus called Shepherds, were also called Captives, in their sacred books."

[...]

26. And now I will turn my discourse to one of their principal writers, whom I have a little before made use of as a witness to our antiquity; I mean Manetho. He promised to interpret the Egyptian history out of their sacred writings, and premised this: that "our people had come into Egypt, many ten thousands in number, and subdued its inhabitants;" and when he had further confessed that "we went out of that country afterward, and settled in that country which is now called Judea, and there built Jerusalem and its temple."

Now thus far he followed his ancient records; but after this he permits himself, in order to appear to have written what rumors and reports passed abroad about the Jews, and introduces incredible narrations, as if he would have the Egyptian multitude, that had the leprosy and other distempers, to have been mixed with us, as he says they were, and that they were condemned to fly out of Egypt together; for he mentions Amenophis, a fictitious king's name, though on that account he durst not set down the number of years of his reign, which yet he had accurately done as to the other kings he mentions; he then ascribes certain fabulous stories to this king, as having in a manner forgotten how he had already related that the departure of the shepherds for Jerusalem had been five hundred and eighteen years before; for Tethmosis was king when they went away.

[...] When Manetho therefore had acknowledged that our forefathers were gone out of Egypt so many years ago, he introduces his fictitious king Amenophis , and says thus:

"This king was desirous to become a spectator of the gods, as had Orus, one of his predecessors in that kingdom, desired the same before him; he also communicated that his desire to his namesake Amenophis, who was the son of Papis, and one that seemed to partake of a divine nature, both as to wisdom and the knowledge of futurities."

Manetho adds, "how this namesake of his told him that he might see the gods, if he would clear the whole country of the lepers and of the other impure people; that the king was pleased with this injunction, and got together all that had any defect in their bodies out of Egypt; and that their number was eighty thousand; whom he sent to those quarries which are on the east side of the Nile, that they might work in them, and might be separated from the rest of the Egyptians."

He says further, that

"there were some of the learned priests that were polluted with the leprosy; but that still this Amenophis, the wise man and the prophet, was afraid that the gods would be angry at him and at the king, if there should appear to have been violence offered them; who also added this further, [out of his sagacity about futurities,] that certain people would come to the assistance of these polluted wretches, and would conquer Egypt, and keep it in their possession thirteen years; that, however, he durst not tell the king of these things, but that he left a writing behind him about all those matters, and then slew himself, which made the king disconsolate."

After which he writes thus verbatim:

"After those that were sent to work in the quarries had continued in that miserable state for a long while, the king was desired that he would set apart the city Avaris, which was then left desolate of the shepherds, for their habitation and protection; which desire he granted them.

Now this city, according to the ancient theology, was Typho's city. But when these men were gotten into it, and found the place fit for a revolt, they appointed themselves a ruler out of the priests of Hellopolis, whose name was Osarsiph, and they took their oaths that they would be obedient to him in all things. He then, in the first place, made this law for them, That they should neither worship the Egyptian gods, nor should abstain from any one of those sacred animals which they have in the highest esteem, but kill and destroy them all; that they should join themselves to nobody but to those that were of this confederacy.

When he had made such laws as these, and many more such as were mainly opposite to the customs of the Egyptians, he gave order that they should use the multitude of the hands they had in building walls about their City, and make themselves ready for a war with king Amenophis, while he did himself take into his friendship the other priests, and those that were polluted with them, and sent ambassadors to those shepherds who had been driven out of the land by Tefilmosis to the city called Jerusalem; whereby he informed them of his own affairs, and of the state of those others that had been treated after such an ignominious manner, and desired that they would come with one consent to his assistance in this war against Egypt. He also promised that he would, in the first place, bring them back to their ancient city and country Avaris, and provide a plentiful maintenance for their multitude; that he would protect them and fight for them as occasion should require, and would easily reduce the country under their dominion.

These shepherds were all very glad of this message, and came away with alacrity all together, being in number two hundred thousand men; and in a little time they came to Avaris.

And now Amenophis the king of Egypt, upon his being informed of their invasion, was in great confusion, as calling to mind what Amenophis, the son of Papis, had foretold him; and, in the first place, he assembled the multitude of the Egyptians, and took counsel with their leaders, and sent for their sacred animals to him, especially for those that were principally worshipped in their temples, and gave a particular charge to the priests distinctly, that they should hide the images of their gods with the utmost care he also sent his son Sethos, who was also named Ramesses, from his father Rhampses, being but five years old, to a friend of his.

He then passed on with the rest of the Egyptians, being three hundred thousand of the most warlike of them, against the enemy, who met them. Yet did he not join battle with them; but thinking that would be to fight against the gods, he returned back and came to Memphis, where he took Apis and the other sacred animals which he had sent for to him, and presently marched into Ethiopia, together with his whole army and multitude of Egyptians; for the king of Ethiopia was under an obligation to him, on which account he received him, and took care of all the multitude that was with him, while the country supplied all that was necessary for the food of the men. He also allotted cities and villages for this exile, that was to be from its beginning during those fatally determined thirteen years. Moreover, he pitched a camp for his Ethiopian army, as a guard to king Amenophis, upon the borders of Egypt. And this was the state of things in Ethiopia.

But for the people of Jerusalem, when they came down together with the polluted Egyptians, they treated the men in such a barbarous manner, that those who saw how they subdued the aforementioned country, and the horrid wickedness they were guilty of, thought it a most dreadful thing; for they did not only set the cities and villages on fire but were not satisfied till they had been guilty of sacrilege, and destroyed the images of the gods, and used them in roasting those sacred animals that used to be worshipped, and forced the priests and prophets to be the executioners and murderers of those animals, and then ejected them naked out of the country. It was also reported that the priest, who ordained their polity and their laws, was by birth of Hellopolls, and his name Osarsiph, from Osyris, who was the god of Hellopolls; but that when he was gone over to these people, his name was changed, and he was called Moses."

27. This is what the Egyptians relate about the Jews, with much more, which I omit for the sake of brevity. But still Manetho goes on, that

"after this, Amenophis returned back from Ethiopia with a great army, as did his son Ahampses with another army also, and that both of them joined battle with the shepherds and the polluted people, and beat them, and slew a great many of them, and pursued them to the bounds of Syria."

These and the like accounts are written by Manetho. But I will demonstrate that he trifles, and tells arrant lies, after I have made a distinction which will relate to what I am going to say about him; for this Manetho had granted and confessed that this nation was not originally Egyptian, but that they had come from another country, and subdued Egypt, and then went away again out of it. But that those Egyptians who were thus diseased in their bodies were not mingled with us afterward, and that Moses who brought the people out was not one of that company, but lived many generations earlier, I shall endeavor to demonstrate from Manetho's own accounts themselves.

Certainly, what interests us is that Josephus says that this story of the origins of the Jews was "what the Egyptians relate about the Jews."

It has been fairly simple for modern scholars to argue that perhaps Manetho didn't know what he was talking about because he lived so many years after the times of the histories he was recounting. And so, there is a strong tendency - especially amongst religious scholars - to take Josephus as the more authoritative source regarding the Jews, at least. However, it strikes me that if the papyri that were found in the tomb of King Tut confirm - even in part - what Manetho has said, then Josephus is soundly refuted along with everything else he writes about the "antiquities of the Jews."

 

[Laura]

The Testimony of Tacitus

Tacitus wrote at the end of the first century and beginning of the second century AD. His concise style made his histories required reading from the 16th to the middle of the 19th century and his influence can be detected in the works of Francis Bacon. Tacitu wrote for an educated audience and thus his works reflect the prejudices of educated men of his time. We can discern from his writings that he lived in an era where the educated elite were rational and had a strong aversion to religious fanaticism of any kind. And so, it can be inferred that Tacitus' passage on the Hebrews is not so much a denunciation of religious zealots, but rather it is intended as a lesson on the evils of religious excesses. In our own day and time, particularly after September 11, 2001, we can see the dangers of religious fanaticism and delusion. Tacitus presents the various theories about the origins of the Jews that were commonly discussed in his time - obviously including Josephus - and he does not claim any one of them to be superior to the other so his testimony is extremely valuable as to what ideas had been passed down.

The Jews are said to have been refugees from the island of Crete who settled in the remotest corner of Libya in the days when, according to the story, Saturn was driven from his throne by the aggression of Jupiter. This is a deduction from the name 'Judaei' by which they became known: the word is to be regarded as a barbarous lengthening of 'Idaei', the name of the people dwelling around the famous Mount Ida in Crete.

A few authorities hold that in the reign of Isis the surplus population of Egypt was evacuated to neighbouring lands under the leadership of Hierosolymus and Judas.

Many assure us that the Jews are descended from those Ethiopians who were driven by fear and hatred to emigrate from their home country when Cepheus was king.

There are some who say that a motley collection of landless Assyrians occupied a part of Egypt, and then built cities of their own, inhabiting the lands of the Hebrews and the nearer parts of Syria.

Others again find a famous ancestry for the Jews in the Solymi who are mentioned with respect in the epics of Homer: this tribe is supposed to have founded Jerusalem and named it after themselves.

Most authorities, however, agree on the following account. The whole of Egypt was once plagued by a wasting disease which caused bodily disfigurement. So Pharaoh Bocchoris went to the oracle of Hammon to ask for a cure, and was told to purify his kingdom by expelling the victims to other lands, as they lay under a divine curse. Thus a multitude of sufferers was rounded up, herded together, and abandoned in the wilderness. Here the exiles tearfully resigned themselves to their fate. But one of them, who was called Moses, urged his companions not to wait passively for help from god or man, for both had deserted them: they should trust to their own initiative and to whatever guidance first helped them to extricate themselves from their present plight.

They agreed, and started off at random into the unknown. But exhaustion set in, chiefly through lack of water, and the level plain was already strewn with the bodies of those who had collapsed and were at their last gasp when a herd of wild asses left their pasture and made for the shade of a wooded crag. Moses followed them and was able to bring to light a number of abundant channels of water whose presence he had deduced from a grassy patch of ground. This relieved their thirst. They travelled on for six days without a break, and on the seventh they expelled the previous inhabitants of Canaan, took over their lands and in them built a holy city and temple.

In order to secure the allegiance of his people in the future, Moses prescribed for them a novel religion quite different from those of the rest of mankind.

Among the Jews all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral.

In the innermost part of the Temple, they consecrated an image of the animal which had delivered them from their wandering and thirst, choosing a ram as beast of sacrifice to demonstrate, so it seems, their contempt for Hammon. The bull is also offered up, because the Egyptians worship it as Apis.

They avoid eating pork in memory of their tribulations, as they themselves were once infected with the disease to which this creature is subject.

They still fast frequently as an admission of the hunger they once endured so long, and to symbolize their hurried meal the bread eaten by the Jews is unleavened. We are told that the seventh day was set aside for rest because this marked the end of their toils.

In course of time the seductions of idleness made them devote every seventh year to indolence as well. Others say that this is a mark of respect to Saturn, either because they owe the basic principles of their religion to the Idaei, who, we are told, were expelled in the company of Saturn and became the founders of the Jewish race, or because, among the seven stars that rule mankind, the one that describes the highest orbit and exerts the greatest influence is Saturn. A further argument is that most of the heavenly bodies complete their path and revolutions in multiples of seven.

Whatever their origin, these observances are sanctioned by their antiquity.

The other practices of the Jews are sinister and revolting, and have entrenched themselves by their very wickedness. Wretches of the most abandoned kind who had no use for the religion of their fathers took to contributing dues and free-will offerings to swell the Jewish exchequer; and other reasons for their increasing wealth may be found in their stubborn loyalty and ready benevolence towards brother Jews. But the rest of the world they confront with the hatred reserved for enemies.

They will not feed or inter-marry with gentiles. Though a most lascivious people, the Jews avoid sexual intercourse with women of alien race. Among themselves nothing is barred.

They have introduced the practice of circumcision to show that they are different from others. Proselytes to Jewry adopt the same practices, and the very first lesson they learn is to despise the gods, shed all feelings of patriotism, and consider parents, children and brothers as readily expendable.

However, the Jews see to it that their numbers increase. It is a deadly sin to kill a born or unborn child, and they think that eternal life is granted to those who die in battle or execution - hence their eagerness to have children, and their contempt for death. Rather than cremate their dead, they prefer to bury them in imitation of the Egyptian fashion, and they have the same concern and beliefs about the world below. But their conception of heavenly things is quite different.

The Egyptians worship a variety of animals and half-human, half-bestial forms, whereas the Jewish religion is a purely spiritual monotheism. They hold it to be impious to make idols of perishable materials in the likeness of man: for them, the Most High and Eternal cannot be portrayed by human hands and will never pass away. For this reason they erect no images in their cities, still less in their temple. Their kings are not so flattered, the Roman emperors not so honoured. However, their priests used to perform their chants to the flute and drums, crowned with ivy, and a golden vine was discovered in the Temple; and this has led some to imagine that the god thus worshipped was Prince Liber, the conqueror of the East. But the two cults are diametrically opposed. Liber founded a festive and happy cult: the Jewish belief is paradoxical and degraded. [...]

While the Assyrian, Median and Persian Empires dominated the East, the Jews were slaves regarded as the lowest of the low. In the Hellenistic period, King Antiochus made an effort to get rid of their primitive cult and Hellenize them, but his would-be reform of this degraded nation was foiled by the outbreak of war with Parthia, for this was the moment of Arsaces' insurrection.

Then, since the Hellenistic rulers were weak and the Parthians had not yet developed into a great power (Rome, too, was still far away), the Jews established a dynasty of their own. These kings were expelled by the fickle mob, but regained control by force, setting up a reign of terror which embraced, among other typical acts of despotism, the banishment of fellow-citizens, the destruction of cities, and the murder of brothers, wives and parents. The kings encouraged the superstitious Jewish religion, for they assumed the office of High Priest in order to buttress their regime.

It seems pretty clear that something truly shameful and totally contradictory to the accepted story of the origins of the Jews occurred back then and we guess that whatever it was, the true story may very well have been buried with Tutankhamun and then concealed again over 3600 years later.

 

[Laura]

Who's on First?

Now, let's take another look at something that Josephus wrote concerning the Judaism of his time:

At this time there were three sects among the Jews, who had different opinions concerning human actions; the one was called the sect of the Pharisees, another the sect of the Sadducees, and the other the sect of the Essens.

Now for the Pharisees, they say that some actions, but not all, are the work of fate, and some of them are in our own power, and that they are liable to fate, but are not caused by fate.

But the sect of the Essens affirm, that fate governs all things, and that nothing befalls men but what is according to its determination.

And for the Sadducees, they take away fate, and say there is no such thing, and that the events of human affairs are not at its disposal; but they suppose that all our actions are in our own power, so that we are ourselves the causes of what is good, and receive what is evil from our own folly. [...]

What I would now explain is this, that the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers. And concerning these things it is that great disputes and differences have arisen among them, while the Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich, and have not the populace obsequious to them, but the Pharisees have the multitude on their side. But about these two sects, and that of the Essenes, I have treated accurately in the second book of Jewish affairs. [...]

However, this prosperous state of affairs moved the Jews to envy Hyrcanus; but they that were the worst disposed to him were the Pharisees, who were one of the sects of the Judeans, as we have informed you already. These have so great a power over the multitude, that when they say any thing against the king, or against the high priest, they are presently believed. Now Hyrcanus was a disciple of theirs, and greatly beloved by them. [...]

And so we come to the idea that the Mishnah, a work by Tannaitic Rabbis under the leadership of Rabbi Judah Hanasi produced about 210 CE, must have been influenced by the pharisaic rabbis who, as Josephus reports, "have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses."

We know that most of the Talmud - that which offends so many people - was completed about 500 CE. It is a collection of the discussions and decisions of the Rabbis from about 300 to 500 CE. These discussions were an elaboration and clarification of the laws of the Mishnah, which formed the basis of Talmudic debates.

We know from the evidence cited above that the Judaism of the Talmud that existed before the 9th century, after the conversion of the Khazars and the influence they brought to bear on it, changed again with the addition of the ideas of a "Jewish Kingdom on Earth" that necessitated the re-taking of Jerusalem.

We would like to add that this brief highlighting of the evolution of Judaism (or devolution, depending on how you look at it) is not a phenomenon exclusive to that faith. The same processes can be seen in both Christianity and Islam.

The point is, the idea of Jews as a nation or even as an ethnic group that should be "exclusive" does not seem to be original to the faith of the peoples of the short-lived state of ancient Israel.

As can be easily discerned, the peoples who lived in what was then called Judea were from many different origins and nationalities and if there was an Exodus, it was the result of the eruption of the volcano Thera on the island of Santorini approximately 1600 BC, an event which brought the Bronze Age civilization to its knees.

Later, during the time of Josephus, Judea still was not strictly a "Jewish" state. The population again consisted of a hodge-podge of peoples and cultures. More than that, not all of the Israelites even lived according to the "ways of the Israelites" at any point in history. For example, in Josephus' time, many Jews were quite Hellenized, witness the apostle Paul.

One thing that is abundantly clear is that none of these peoples, once Jerusalem had been destroyed (apparently due mainly to Jewish rabble rousing as had been the case prior to the Babylonian invasion), had any idea that some great religious state had come to an end and that they should harbour hopes of its recreation in the future. That is purely and simply an evolution of thought produced by the Khazarian influence.

The Khazar people belonged to a grouping of Turks who wrote in a runic script that originated in Mongolia. The royalty of the Khazar kingdom was descended from the Ashina Turkic dynasty. In the ninth century, the Khazarian royalty and nobility as well as a significant portion of the Khazarian Turkic population embraced the Jewish religion. After their conversion, the Khazars were ruled by a succession of Jewish kings and began to adopt the hallmarks of Jewish civilization, including the Torah and Talmud, the Hebrew script, and the observance of Jewish holidays. A portion of the empire's population adopted Christianity and Islam.

When the Khazarian Empire came under threat from hostile powers, many of them migrated deeper into Europe carrying the Religion of Judaism with them into Hungary, Ukraine, and other areas of Europe.

Therefore it is evident that modern European Jews, while they practice a 1st century religion of the Pharisee's which was established as Rabbinical Judaism after 70 AD, have no connection whatsoever to the peoples who formerly occupied the area known as Palestine, given to them by illegal acts of Britain, and turned into Israel. They are, by definitions of the very Torah they claim to hold sacred, Gentiles. By the standards of the Essenes, who may very well be the followers of an ancient type of Judaism, the current day Jews aren't even Jews.

Furthermore, Judaism is a Religious system, not a Nationality or a race or even an ethnicity. The modern state of Israel came into being via imperial colonialism and genocide that continues to this very day.

So one should ask themselves if they are Jewish and practice Judaism: "Am I Jewish because I am Judean or Israelite by origin, or am I Jewish by being a descendant of a convert to a Religion? And if being Jewish today really is all about Nationality, then why is it that anyone of any nation can convert to Judaism and become a Jew and Jewish?

And so, in the end, we discover that in the truest sense, anti-Semitism could be defined as "against Aryan/Indo-Europeans." Of course, if it is true that Abraham was a Hittite, then it could be said that the "Patriarch of the Jews" was truly a Semite, but the tribes who were assimilated to Judaism in those days were not, judging by the paternal affinity between the Separdic Jews and the Palestinians.

As Koestler remarks, this history reduces the term "anti-Semitism" to meaningless jargon based on a misapprehension shared by both the Nazi killers and their victims.

It also reduces the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the most meaningless and tragic hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

 

[Laura]

The Culture of Critique

Here we come to what may well be the most sensitive issue raised in this book: the influence of Israel and its supporters, be they Jewish or Christian Zionists, who believe the establishment of a Greater Israel is a necessary step in the process leading to the First, or Second, Coming of their Lord. The pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that it is forbidden to discuss its power and influence on U.S. politics and in the U.S. media. Part of the problem is that it is often reduced to the question of the influence and power of "the Jews", which reduces it to a racial distinction. As the reader will see, our analysis is something else entirely.

The reader might wish to have a look at Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements , where they will learn that ethnic Jews have a powerful influence in the American media-far larger than any other identifiable group. [http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/books-Preface.html ]

The extent of Jewish ownership and influence on the popular media in the United States is remarkable given the relatively small proportion of the population that is Jewish."

It should be noted that, in saying this, neither we nor McDonald are talking about ordinary Jews, but rather the Jewish "elite" who claim to be acting in the interests of the Jewish people, but who, in reality, are using the lure of Judaism and its promises of a "homeland" for Jews to manipulate the Jewish people. We also wish to remind the reader of the comments of Dr. Lobaczewski concerning the influence of Schizoidal types and their writings on the preparatory stages of the inception of Pathocracy, and their statistically significant presence among Jews.

Israel, therefore, is in control of one of the most potent means of creating the "official culture" of America and can use these means to suit its own agenda, including making the terms "conspiracy theory" and "anti-Semitic" such horrible epithets that no one would dare to speak anything that might put them at risk of being so branded!

An examination of the mass media in the U.S. gives a chilling review of this influence.

"After World War II, television flourished. [...] Psychologists and sociologists were brought in to study human nature in relation to selling; in other words, to figure out how to manipulate people without their feeling manipulated. Dr. Ernest Dichter, President of the Institute for Motivational Research made a statement in 1941... 'the successful ad agency manipulates human motivations and desires and develops a need for goods with which the public has at one time been unfamiliar -- perhaps even undesirous of purchasing.'

Discussing the influence of television, Daniel Boorstin wrote: 'Here at last is a supermarket of surrogate experience. Successful programming offers entertainment - under the guise of instruction; instruction - under the guise of entertainment; political persuasion - with the appeal of advertising; and advertising - with the appeal of drama.'

[...] programmed television serves not only to spread acquiescence and conformity, but it represents a deliberate industry approach."

Allen Funt, host of a popular television show, Candid Camera, was once asked what was the most disturbing thing he had learned about people in his years of dealing with them through the media. His response was chilling in its ramifications:

"The worst thing, and I see it over and over, is how easily people can be led by any kind of authority figure, or even the most minimal kinds of authority. A well-dressed man walks up the down escalator and most people will turn around and try desperately to go up also... We put up a sign on the road, 'Delaware Closed Today'. Motorists didn't even question it. Instead they asked: 'Is Jersey open?'"

Submission to minimal signs of authority; lack of knowledge and awareness; a desire for a quick fix and an easy way out. These, it would seem, are the characteristics of the average citizen on the planet today. Of course, none of it would be possible without the help of the mainstream media.

The careful observer with knowledge of history will note immediately that what we are describing is Fascist style propaganda of the same sort that was instituted in Nazi Germany.

On October 3, 2001, I.A.P. News reported that, according to Israel Radio (in Hebrew) Kol Yisrael, an acrimonious argument erupted during the Israeli cabinet weekly session between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Peres warned Sharon that refusing to heed incessant American requests for a cease-fire with the Palestinians would endanger Israeli interests and "turn the US against us". "Sharon reportedly yelled at Peres, saying, "don't worry about American pressure, we, the Jewish people control America".

On a July 1973 edition of CBS' "Face the Nation" Senator Fullbright, Chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee stated:

"The Israelis control the policy in the congress and the senate."

On page 99 of Donald Neff's book Fallen Pillars, he quotes Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower (from 1953 - 1959) John Foster Dulles as saying:

"I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy [in the Middle East] not approved by the Jews... terrific control the Jews have over the news media and the barrage the Jews have built up on congressmen ....

I am very much concerned over the fact that the Jewish influence here is completely dominating the scene and making it almost impossible to get congress to do anything they don't approve of. The Israeli embassy is practically dictating to the congress through influential Jewish people in the country."

At this point we would like to make a very clear distinction between normal Jewish people and those psychopaths who claim to represent them. While there is strong evidence to suggest an Israeli government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, in recent years we have been concerned to see a growing tendency among some independent 9/11 investigators to fall into the trap of blaming the Jewish people en masse for the actions of their government.

Such authors should consider whether it would be fair to call all Americans, themselves included, "bloodthirsty war criminals that delight in the death of Iraqi children", because to talk about "Jews" being responsible for 9/11 is certainly unfair to the Jewish people. Instead of "Jews", a more accurate definition would be "Psychopathic Zionists". That is not to say that many Jews to one degree or another do not support the actions of the state of Israel, but the majority (like many American Christians) are manipulated by religions created by psychopaths; they are caught in the mesmerizing influence of "spellbinders".

In any case, by talking of "Jews" in this way, these authors are needlessly and wantonly exposing themselves and their fellow 9/11 truth seekers to attacks that can be justified in terms of the argument that most Jews, like most Americans, are not directly responsible for the crimes of their leaders, and any suggestion to the contrary is evidence of "anti-Semitism".

The simple fact is that most people are manipulated to bear responsibility for the crimes of their leaders. Do the authors in question not realise that by labelling all Jews as accomplices to the crimes of the elite cabal of psychopaths, they are helping this cabal in their ultimate goal: to create the right social conditions for a savage war in the Middle East where both Jews and Arabs may well be annihilated? That this war in the Middle East may explode on their own doorsteps if "ethnic specific weapons" designed to wipe out non-psychopaths don't get them first?

If such authors see themselves as true humanitarians and truth seekers, their goal should be to protect normal human beings - including ethical ethnic and religious Jews, ethical Christians, and ethical Muslims - from the predations and manipulations of the psychopathic elite few who use and abuse humanity over and over again, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic alike. To this end their energy would be best used by focusing on and exposing the agenda of this "psychopathic elite", not by beating up on those who are least able to understand that they are being duped. The battle is fought between those from opposing sides of the fence who can See - what is being fought over is the soul and future of the human race.

Nevertheless, in considering all that we have covered so far in this volume, the issue of Jewish genetics studies and how they relate to the secret work on Ethnic Specific weapons must be brought forward.

 

[Laura]

The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence

This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability.

As with any regime of strong directional selection on a quantitative trait, genetic variants that were otherwise fitness reducing rose in frequency. In particular we propose that the well-known clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster in particular, increase intelligence in heterozygotes. Other Ashkenazi disorders are known to increase intelligence. Although these disorders have been attributed to a bottleneck in Ashkenazi history and consequent genetic drift, there is no evidence of any bottleneck. Gene frequencies at a large number of autosomal loci show that if there was a bottleneck then subsequent gene flow from Europeans must ave been very large, obliterating the effects of any bottleneck. The clustering of the disorders in only a few pathways and the presence at elevated frequency of more than one deleterious allele at many of them could not have been produced by drift. Instead these are signatures of strong and recent natural selection. [...]

There are several key observations that motivate our hypothesis. The first is that the Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, combined with an unusual cognitive profile, while no similar elevation of intelligence was observed among Jews in classical times nor is one seen in Sephardic and Oriental Jews today.

The second is that the Ashkenazim experienced very low inward gene flow, which created a favorable situation for natural selection.

The third is that they experienced unusual selective pressures that were likely to have favored increased intelligence. For the most part they had jobs in which increased IQ strongly favored economic success, in contrast with other populations, who were mostly peasant farmers. They lived in circumstances in which economic success led to increase reproductive success.

The fourth is the existence of the Ashkenazi sphingolipid, DNA repair, and other disease clusters, groups of biochemically related mutations that could not plausibly have reached their present high frequencies by chance, that are not common in adjacent populations, and that have physiological effects that could increase intelligence.

Other selective factors have been suggested. "Winnowing through persecution" suggests that only the smartest Jews survived persecution. Why this should be so is not clear. There was no similar outcome in other groups such as Gypsies who have faced frequent persecution (Crowe and Kolsti, 1991). Another theory suggests that there was selective breeding for Talmudic scholarship. This seems unlikely to have been an important selective factor, since there weren't very many professional rabbis, certainly less than one ercent of the population. A selective force that only affects a tiny fraction of the population can never be strong enough to cause important evolutionary change in tens of generations. A plausible variant of the Talmudic scholarship model suggests that it was like a sexually selected marker and that rich families preferred to marry their daughters to males who excelled (Weyl and Possony, 1963; MacDonald, 1994) so that the payoff to telligence was indirect rather than direct as we suggest. Without detailed historical demographic information it will be difficult to evaluate this hypothesis. [...]

We describe two main clusters of Ashkenazi inherited disease, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster, reviewing evidence that these modulate early central nervous system development. A sample of Gaucher disease patients show a startling occupational spectrum of high IQ jobs, and several other Ashkenazi disorders, idiopathic torsion dystonia and non-classical adrenal hyperplasia, are known to elevate IQ.[...]

Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112-115. [...]

This fact has social significance because IQ (as measured by IQ tests) is the best predictor we have of succes in academic subjects and most jobs. Ashkenazi Jews are just as successful as their tested would predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in occupations and fields with the ighest cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US opulation but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turin awards. Thev account for more than half of world chess champions. [...]

This High IQ and corresponding high academic ability have been long known.[...]

Ashkenazi Jews have an unusual ability profile as well as higher than average IQ. The have high verbal and mathematical scores, while their visuospatial abilities are typical somewhat lower, by about one half a standard deviation, than the European average (Levinson, 1977; Levinson and Block, 1977).[...]

The Ashkenazi pattern of success is what one would expect from this abil istribution-great success in mathematics and literature, more typical results resentational painting, sculpture, and architecture.

It is noteworthy that non-Ashkenazi Jews do not have high average IQ test scores (Ortar,1967), nor are they overrepresented in cognitively demanding fields. This is important indeveloping any causal explanation of Ashkenazi cognitive abilities: any such theory must explain high Ashkenazi IQ, the unusual structure of their cognitive abilities, and the lack of these traits among Sephardic and Oriental Jews(Burg and Belmont, 1990; Patai, 1977) [...]

IQ tests predict a host of characteristic iduals including educational attainment, job performance, income, health, an non-obvious characteristics like susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease. In general t search for social and nutritional causes of IQ differences has not led to any convincin results and most workers now regard IQ as a biological rather than a social variable. [...]

IQ test scores are highly heritable, almost always greater than 0.5 when adult scor studied. Lower heritability estimates are found for children's IQ: the IQ of children does seem to reflect in part environmental influences like the social class of the home in whic the child is reared, but these influences disappear as the child matures and are essentially gone in adulthood. In the same way enrichment programs like Head Start cause a transient elevation in IO scores of children but these effects disappear as the child matures.[...]

With its high heritability, IQ should respond rapidly to directional selection... Assumine parents of the next generation have an average IQ one point above the population mean, the average IQ increases by 0.8 points per generation. In 20 human generations about 500 years, it would increase by 16 points-slightly more than the difference between average Ashkenazi IQ scores and average European IQ scores. Change of this magnitude over historical time is not at all implausible.

Detailed demographic data about early medieval Ashkenazim are lacking, but we c infer plausible parameters from the scarce information that we do have. First, their jo were cognitively demanding since they were essentially restricted to entrepreneurial managerial roles as financiers, estate managers, tax farmers, and merchants. These ar s that people with an IQ below 100 essentially cannot do. Even low-level clerical require something like an IQ of 90 (Gottfredson, 2003).[...]

Since strong selection for IQ seems to be unusual in humans (few populations have had most members performing high-complexity jobs) and since near-total reproductive isolation is also unusual, the Ashkenazim may be the only extant human population with polymorphic frequencies of IQ-boosting disease mutations, although another place to look for a similar phenomenon is in India. In particular the Parsi are an endogamous group with high levels of economic achievement, a history of long distance trading, business, and management, and who suffer high prevalences of Parkinson disease, breast cancer, and tremor disorders, diseases not present in their neighbors (see "The UNESC Parsi Zoroastrian Proiect". httD://www.unescoparzor.com).[...]

Rapid selection does not always yield efficient solutions. Overdominant mutations that increase heterozvgote fitness and harm homozygotes are favored in the short run, but over longer periods, modifier genes decrease the associated genetic load (Hammerstein, 1996). Sickle cell, the canonical example of overdominance in humans, is a response to a recent selective influence, since falciparum malaria in its present form is probably only a few thousand years old. We usually think of over dominant mutations as defenses against infectious diseases, and indeed many are, but rapid selection for metric traits other than disease resistance can also result in polymorphic frequencies of overdominant alleles. [...]

Selection for IQ among the Ashkenazim then would have had associated costs. First, genetic changes that aided fitness in a urban environment where most jobs had high IQ elasticity almost certainly reduced fitness in more typical environments, simply because change away from the optimum mix for a traditional environment. The expectation is that Ashkenazim would most likely suffer competitive disadvantage as peasant farmers or hunter-gatherers, for example.

Mutations that increased heterozygote fitness in the unique environment experienced by the Ashkenazim (by increasing IQ, for example) while harming homozygotes could have become relatively common, just as sickle cell has. Our hypothesis is that many, perhaps most of the characteristic Ashkenazi genetic diseases fall into this category. Selection has imposed a heavy human cost - not crippling at the population level, cheaper than the malaria-defense mutations like sickle-cell and G6PD deficiencv. but tragic nonetheless.[...]

When we first see them in the historical record, the Ashkenazim were long-distanc merchants who traded with the Moslem world. This is the beginning of an occupat attern that is very different from those of other Europeans and from those of other Jewish groups, as well. The majority of Jews had already given up agriculture (Bottici and Eckstein, 2002), but the Jews of Islam, although urban, mostly worked in various crafts. The Ashkenazim, from their beginnings and for a long time, seldom had suc This pattern is detailed in Gross (1975, p. 147): "Two entirely different patterns i ractice of crafts and their place in Jewish life and society are discernible throughout t Middle Ages. One characterizes the communities in countries around the Mediterrane including in the south those in the continents of Asia and Africa, and in the north extending more or less to an imaginary demarcation line from the Pyrenees to the northern end of the Balkans. The other, in the Christian countries of Europe, was more o less north of the Pyrenees-Balkans line." and (p. 151) "North of the Pyrenees and Balkans crafts played a very small role as a Jewish occupation, from the incept Jewish settlement there."

The Ashkenazi population, established in northern France by the early 900s, prospered and expanded. They settled the Rhineland and England after the Norman Conquest. At first they were international merchants who acted as intermediaries with the Moslem world. As Moslems and Christians, especially Italians, increasingly found it possible to do business directly, Ashkenazi merchants moved more and more into local trade. When persecution began to be a serious problem and the security required for long-distance travel no longer existed, the Ashkenazim specialized more and more in one occupation, finance, left particularly open to them because of the Christian prohibition of usury. The majority of the Ashkenazim seem to have been moneylenders by 1100 AD (Ben-Sasson 1976; Arkin, 1975), and this continued for several centuries. Such occupations (sales, trade, finance) had high IQ demands, and we know of no other population that had suc large fraction of cognitively demanding jobs for an extended period.

In some cases, we have fairly detailed records of this activity. For example (Arkin, 1975 p.58), concerning the Jews of Roussilon circa 1270: "The evidence is overwhelming that this rather substantial group of Jews supported itself by money lending, to the virtual exclusion of all other economic activities. Of the 228 adult male Jews mentioned in the registers, almost 80 percent appear as lenders to their Christian neighbors. Nor were loans by Jewish women (mostly widows) uncommon, and the capital of minors was often invested in a similar manner. Moreover, the Jews most active as moneylenders appear to have been the most respected members of the communitv."

The Jews in this period were prosperous. Ben-Sasson points out (p. 401) that "Western Europe suffered virtual famine for many years in the tenth and eleventh centuries, there is no hint or echo of this in the Jewish sources of the region in this period. The city dweller lived at an aristocratic level, as befitted international merchants an honored local financiers." Their standard of living was that of the lower nobilitv (Roth, 2002)

Although prosperous, they were not safe. The first major crisis was the First Crusade, resulting in the death of something like a quarter of the Jews in the Rhineland. Religious hostility, probably exacerbated by commercial rivalries, increased, manifesting itself in the form of massacres and expulsions culminating in the expulsion of the Jews from most of Western Europe. They were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1394, and from various regions of Germany in the 15th century. The expulsions had greater effect in the long run than massacres and persecutions. Jewish population growth rates were high due to prosperity and distaste for family limitation; so numbers tended to recover from attacks after a generation or two. But the potential for such population recovery decreased as Jews were excluded from more and more of Western Europe.

Many of the Jews moved east, first to Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, then to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealthe. The Polish rulers welcomed Jewish immigrants who could help modernize and reconstruct the country, which had been devastated by Mongol raids. Jews were welcome as urban investors and initiators of trade. [...]

As they had in Western Europe, the Jews of Poland had a very unusual occupational profile. The very first to immigrate were mainly moneylenders, but that soon change They became tax-farmers, toll-farmers, estate managers, and they ran mills and taverns. According to Weinryb (1972) in the middle of the fourteenth century, "About 15 percent of the Jewish population were earners of wages, salaries and fees. The rest were independent owners of business enterprises." They were the management class of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Besides literacy, success in those specialized occupations depended upon skills similar to those of businessmen today, not least the abilitv to keep track of complex transactions and money flows.

Eventually, as the Ashkenazi population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth creased, more and more Jews became craftsmen - there are after only so many managerial and financial slots. Still, for 800 to 900 years, from roughly 800 AD to 1650 or 1700 AD, the great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs, jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge.

Jews who were particularly good at these jobs enjoyed increased reproductive success. Weinryb (1972, see also Hundert 1992) comments: "more children survived to adulthood in affluent families than in less affluent ones. A number of genealogies of business leaders, prominent rabbis, community leaders, and the like generally belonging to more affluent classes - show that such people often had four, six, sometimes even eight or nine children who reached adulthood. On the other hand, there are some indications that poorer families tended to be small ones. It should also be added that overcrowding, which favors epidemics was more prevalent among the poorer classes. In short, the number of children surviving among Polish Jews seems to have varied considerably from one social level to another." He goes on to suggest that wealthier Jews were less crowded as they lived in bigger houses, they could keep their houses warmer, they could afford wet-nursesthey had better access to rural refugia from epidemics. [...]

Societies reward different behavioral traits. In some times and places successful warriors and soldiers have had high status, in others merchants, in still others bureaucrats as in ancient China. There were societies in premodern Europe in which merchants and businessmen ranked near the top, but this was atypical. To the extent that status and wealth were inherited rather than earned, the correlation between cognitive traits and reproductive success in elite croups may have been quite weak.

In almost every case elite groups experienced substantial gene flow with other, much larger groups that were not subject to the same selective pressures. This means that the selective pressures experienced by such groups were diluted, spread out into the general population. Christian merchants in London or Rotterdam may have experienced selective pressures similar to those of the Ashkenazi Jews, but they intermarried: there was extensive gene flow with the general population, the majority of whom were farmers.

The selection pressures experienced by farmers were probably quite different: most likely cognitive skills did not have as high a correlation with income among farmers that they did among ndividuals whose occupations required extensive symbol manipulation, such as as moneylenders, tax farmers, and estate managers.

The Ashkenazi occupational pattern was different from that of the Jews living in the Islamic world. The Jews of Islam, although reproductively isolated, did not have the concentration of occupations with high IQ elasticity. Some had such job in some of the Arab world, in some periods, but it seems it was never the case that most did. In part this was because other minority groups competed successfully for these jobs - Greek Christians, Armenians, etc., in part because Moslems, at least some of the time, took many of those jobs themselves, valuing non-warrior occupations more highly than did medieval Christians. In fact, to a large extent, and especially during the last six or seven hundred years of relative Moslem decline, the Jews of Islam tended to have "dirty" jobs (Lewis, 1984). These included such tasks as cleaning cesspools and drying the contents for use as fuel - a common Jewish occupation in Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia. Jews were also found as tanners, butchers, hangmen, and other disagreeable or despised occupations. Such jobs must have had low IQ elasticity; brilliant tanners and hangmen almost certainly did not become rich.

The suggested selective process explains the pattern of mental abilities in Ashkenazi Jews - high verbal and mathematical ability but relatively low spatio-visual ability. Verbal and mathematical talent helped medieval businessmen succeed, while spatio-visual abilities were irrelevant. [ Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, Department of Anthropology, University of Utah.]

Notice that, at the beginning of this quote, it is said that there are two main clusters of Ashkenazi inherited disease, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster. Among the other significant Ashkenazi disorders we find idiopathic torsion dystonia and non-classical adrenal hyperplasia which are known to elevate IQ.

In a paper entitled Inborn Errors and Disturbances of Central Neurotransmission (with Special Reference to Phenylketonuria), M. Sandler mentions:

A rather tenuous story of decreased adrenaline and noradrenaline production in the Riley-Day syndrome (familial dysautonomia) is on record (Goodall et al., 1971), despite normal dopamine generation with no impediment in the conversion of dopamine to noradrenaline. It is possible that any change in this disorder is secondary to some distortion of nerve growth factor disposition (Siggers et al., 1976; Schwartz and Breakefield, 1980). [M. Sandler, Bernhard Baron Memorial Research Laboratories and Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital, London W6 OXG.]

The paper in which this comment appears is mostly about Phenylketonuria, a genetic disorder that consists mainly of an inability of the body to utilize the essential amino acid, phenylalanine. Classic PKU and the other causes of hyperphenylalaninemia affects mainly Caucasians and Orientals, and to a much lesser extent, Africans. Many of the infants who are born with this condition have blue eyes and fairer hair and skin than other family members. The condition generally leads to severe brain problems such as mental retardation and seizures.

So, what is the connection? Riley-Day syndrome. It is found almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews. The incidence is estimated to be 1 in 3,700 people, higher than the incidence of PKU.

Infants with this condition have feeding problems and develop pneumonia caused by breathing their formula and food into their airways. Vomiting and sweating spells begin as the infant matures. Young children may also have breath-holding spells that produce unconsciousness, since they can hold their breath for long enough to pass out without feeling the discomfort that normal children would.

A hallmark of Riley-Day syndrome is insensitivity to pain. This leads to unnoticed injuries or injuries that might not have occurred had the child sensed discomfort. Children do not feel the normal sensations that generally warn of impending injury, such as drying of the eyes, pressure over pressure points, and chronic rubbing and chaffing. Bone and skin pain, including burns, are also poorly perceived. However, they can feel visceral pain, like menstrual cramps.

Seizures occur in almost 50% of affected children. They have acute problems with high and low blood pressure. They may have problems regulating their body temperature.

Riley-Day syndrome is inherited as an autosomal recessive trait, which means that a person must inherit the defective gene from both parents in order to develop the condition.

It is of interest that phenylethylamine possesses very similar pharmacological properties to amphetamine, (Mantegazza and Riva, 1963) from which it differs only by the absence of a methyl group on the a-carbon atom. Amphetamine psychosis is almost indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia (Janowsky and Risch, 1979) and in accordance with the phenylethylamine hypothesis of schizophrenia (Sandler and Reynolds, 1976), it is not surprising that a high propotion of untreated phenylketonurics manifest with some of the stigmata of the disease which can be attenuated by reduced phenylalanine intake (Blyumina, 1975). These schizophreniform signs may well stem from the prolonged effects of phenylethylamine overproduction.

Let us now recall what Lobaczewski had to say about schizoidal psychopathy.

Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, while, at the same time, pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to assume extreme positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses. Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situation and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people's intentions. They easily become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. We frequently find expressions of their characteristic attitudes in their statements and writings: "Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea." Let us call this typical expression the "schizoid declaration". [...]

The common factor in the varieties of this anomaly is a dull pallor of emotion and lack of feeling for the psychological realities, an essential factor in basic intelligence. This can be attributed to some incomplete quality of the instinctive substratum, which works as though founded on shifting sand. Low emotional pressure enables them to develop proper speculative reasoning, which is useful in non-humanistic spheres of activity, but because of their one-sidedness, they tend to consider themselves intellectually superior to "ordinary" people.

The quantitative frequency of this anomaly varies among races and nations: low among Blacks, the highest among Jews. Estimates of this frequency range from negligible up to 3 %. In Poland it may be estimated as 0.7 % of population. My observations suggest this anomaly is autosomally hereditary. [...]

Their tendency to see human reality in the doctrinaire and simplistic manner they consider "proper" - i.e. "black or white" - transforms their frequently good intentions into bad results. However, their ponerogenic role can have macrosocial implications if their attitude toward human reality and their tendency to invent great doctrines are put to paper and duplicated in large editions. [...]

An analysis of the role played by Karl Marx's works easily reveals all the above-mentioned types of apperception and the social reactions which engendered animosity between large groups of people. [...]

The conviction that Karl Marx is the best example of this is correct as he was the best-known figure of that kind. Frostig , [Peter Jacob FROSTIG, 1896-1959. Professor of King John Kasimir University in Lwow. (now Ukraine). I used his manual Psychiatria. Poland was then under pathocratic rule and his works were removed from public libraries as "ideologically improper"] a psychiatrist of the old school, included Engels and others into a category he called "bearded schizoidal fanatics". The famous writings attributed to "Zionist Wise Men" at the turn of the century begin with a typically schizoidal declaration. The nineteenth century, especially its latter half, appears to have been a time of exceptional activity on the part of schizoidal individuals, often but not always of Jewish descent. After all we have to remember that 97 % of all Jews do not manifest this anomaly, and that it also appears among all European nations, albeit to a markedly lesser extent. Our inheritance from this period includes world-images, scientific traditions, and legal concepts flavored with the shoddy ingredients of a schizoidal apprehension of reality.

John Forbes Nash was big and brainy, handsome and arrogant. He had virtually no social graces or redeeming qualities despite the fact that he was carefully brought up in an environment that one would have thought to have inculcated some human values. He was, indeed, a star of the mathematical scene that promoted human rationality as the supreme virtue, and for ten years he was viewed as a kind of wunderkind who was going to push the mathematical boundaries of Games of Strategy, economic rivalry, computer architecture, the shape of the inverse and geometric space, number theory, and more. Some commentators suggested that Nash had that "extra human spark". But reading his story, one comes to the idea that he had very little human about him at all. It wasn't a beautiful mind as Sylvia Nasar termed it, it was a deadly efficient machine; unnatural and mysterious.

At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, he suddenly manifested paranoid schizophrenia, psychotic delusions, and was in and out of mental hospitals for a period. After his wife divorced him, his mother died, and his sister could no longer cope with his psychosis, he became a phantom, haunting the halls and corridors of Princeton for twenty years as the resident idiot savant. If any of the readers have watched the very funny movie Sheer Genius, they will remember the strange character of Laszlo, the burned out genius who used a closet in a dorm room as an entry to a vast underground laboratory, a secret world hidden from the eyes of the university authorities. It's rather a sympathetic and idealized portrait of Nash during his psychotic years at Princeton.

In the 1990s, Nash's illness more or less went into remission. The question has been raised: did he really suffer from schizophrenia? Psychotic symptoms do not, as psychiatrists now agree, make a schizophrenic. And absence of overt evidence of psychosis does not mean a person is cured of whatever afflicted them. They can most certainly still be suffering, but having learned to cope with it, are able to conceal it.

Nash himself described his long illness as a persistent dreamlike state and bizarre beliefs not unlike those of other people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Mostly, however, he noted that his illness consisted in being unable to reason. Despite claims of recovery, Nasar quotes him as telling several people that he is still having paranoid thoughts and still hears voices, though the noise level is greatly modulated. He has compared his recovery to simply learning how to police his thoughts, to recognize paranoid ideas and to reject them.

Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking [...] the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort. [...] A key step was a resolution not to concern myself in politics relative to my secret world because it was ineffectual. [...] This in turn led me to renounce anything relative to religious issues, or teaching or intending to teach. [ Quoted by Sylvia Nasar in "A Beautiful Mind."]

Nash's son has also been diagnosed as being paranoid schizophrenic. His illness became apparent when he disappeared one day. When he came back he'd shaved his head and had become a born-again Christian. He began to read the Bible obsessively and had fallen under the influence of a fundamentalist cult called The Way. Not too long after, it was clear the he was hearing voices and believed that he was a great religious figure who had to save the world. Reportedly, he occasionally talked about extraterrestrials, and once threatened a history professor. But, somehow, in spite of his illness, he managed to get a Ph.D. Despite his lack of a high school or college diploma, he was admitted to Rutgers on a full scholarship. That fact raises questions of its own.

In spite of the fact that psychopathy and schizophrenia are viewed as separate diagnostic entities it has long been suggested that these two disorders may be related (Kraepelin, 1913; Kallman, 1938). It is only relatively recently however that a coherent argment in favour of this viewpoint has been advanced (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1976, 1978). These authors cite family studies of both schizophrenics and psychopaths/criminals as well as the theoretical accounts of Planasky (1972) and Gottesman and Shields (1973) in support of the notion tha,t psychopathy and schizophrenia are genetically-related illnesses. Eysenck and Eysenck (1976) propose a polygenic model of psychoses, whereby the number of large- and small-value genes add up to determined degree of psychoses-proneness. On this continuum of diathesis for psychosis psychopaths are argued to lie between non-psychotic individuals with subclinical symptoms and psychosis, and individuals who are clearly psychotic but without demonstrating the clear symptom pattern which, for example, characterizes paranoid or catatonic schizophrenics lying at the extreme of the continuum with large-value genes for psychosis. [Adrian Raine, (1986) Behavioural Sciences Section, Department of Psychiatry, Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham, Notts. NO7 2UH, England, PSYCHOPATHY, SCHIZOID PERSONALITY AND BORDERLINE/SCHIZOTYPAL PERSONALITY DISORDERS, Person. individ. Diff Vol. 7, No.4, pp. 493-501, 1986, Pergamon Journals Ltd.]

In other words, the story of the genetically enhanced intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews is very likely an anthropological description of the process of natural selection for not only intelligence, but for psychopathy. Lobaczewski remarks that psychopaths are generally lower in intelligence than the populations of normal humans he has studied. We believe that this is due to the fact that the very intelligent psychopaths do not ever find themselves subjected to being studied. This certainly causes us to re-think the work being done in Ethnic Specific Weapons, the importance of mtDNA to that work and, naturally this:

One of the earliest factual references to the Khazars occurs in a Syriac chronicle dating from the middle of the sixth century. It mentions the Khazars in a list of people who inhabit the region of the Caucasus. Koestler recounts that other sources indicate that the Khazars were intimately connected with the Huns. An interesting connection considering the legend that the Huns were a tribe of peoples that descended from Scythian witches who, cast out of their tribes, "mated with devils in the desert."

And we wonder if we have discovered the target of ethnic specific weapons: Non- psychopaths?

 

[Iconoclast]

thanks, laura!

 

[Pierre]

thanks, laura!

There's also a lot of interesting information about Israel history in 'Secret history of the World'

After reading this book, I am sure you will give Laura the capital letter she deserves.

 

[Iconoclast]

so, i finally had time to read through it all!
great info! can't wait for my copy of 'secret history'!

 

[PopHistorian]

I mentioned in a recent post on another topic that TV documentaries of any kind about the formation of Israel or Israeli history are non-existent in my experience, and I'd wager that they will continue to be unless some brave, independent filmmaker goes for it. I would guess that they probably exist outside the English-speaking world, though.