Funny, You Don't Look Jewish!

A Jewish American businessman, in the last half of the 19th century was in Shanghai on business and arranged to meet the head of the local Jewish Community at his hotel. The visitor duly arrived – a small Chinese man with a pigtail, moustache and traditional Chinese clothes. He looked at the American and said, “Funny, you don’t look at all Jewish”! So who are the Jews, where do they come from and what “should” they look like? 

We all think we know. We think the Jews left Egypt at the time of the Exodus, occupied Palestine and then spread into Europe and thence to America. Unfortunately, the story is not quite so simple. Archaeological evidence in Palestine suggests that the peoples moving into Palestine at about the time of the presumed Exodus were closely related to the people already living there and were not a distinct group or race. They settled and established the Kingdom of Israel but fairly quickly it split into two, Israel and Judah. 

The two Kingdoms lay directly on the trade routes between Egypt and the countries of the Fertile Crescent and, of course, also on the (same) invasion routes. So fairly soon 

the Northern Kingdom of Israel was invaded and occupied and most its inhabitants taken away into Assyria where they disappeared from history and were, presumably, integrated into the local populations. The southern kingdom of Judah was, in turn, occupied by the Babylonians and the population taken off to Babylon. Some later returned but some stayed in Babylon as the beginnings of the very ancient Jewish community there, pre-dating the arrival of Islam by more than1000 years and surviving until (almost) today. They looked like, sounded like and had many of the customs and characteristics of the local Arab population. 

During the period of the Kingdom of Israel, the Jews established trade routes some of which were through the Red Sea. The Jews of Cochin in South West India have a tradition that they are descended from the traders of the time of Solomon’s Temple. There is no evidence for that but it is certainly plausible. The Cochin community refers to Brown Jews (the original immigrants from Palestine); Black Jews (local Indians who converted to Judaism); and white Jews (Jewish Portuguese traders who settled). 

There is some recent DNA evidence that Jews, most probably traders, from Palestine penetrated far into Africa and settled there. Some tribes have traces of Jewish customs and practices and have semitic DNA although they look to Europeans as if they are African. 

After some of the Jews returned to Palestine from Babylon, they re-established the Kingdom and the population grew again. Then the Greeks (Alexander the Great and his successors) conquered Palestine and much of the known world and were in turn superseded by the Romans. At the time of the Roman domination of Palestine, the Jewish population of the Mediterranean basin and the Roman world in general was very large with well established communities in Egypt, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece, France and Italy. It is unlikely that all of these people were Semitic emigrants. They were almost certainly local converts. They were Greeks (or Italians or Egyptians) who were Jewish rather than Jews who lived in Greece or Italy. They took local names, followed local customs and, over time, even developed differences in Jewish practice. 

When the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and took much of the population as slaves, the Palestinian Jews were, once again, widely dispersed and almost certainly became integrated into the local populations by rape, cohabitation or marriage. 

Jews had been established in Khazaria to the North and East of the Black Sea for a long period when, in the mid ninth century of the Common Era, the Khazar Kingdom converted to Judaism. Tradition suggests that the conversion was the result of a series of disputes or debates between representatives of the three major religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The king had been so impressed by the Jewish presentation that he decided that the whole country would convert to Judaism. Geopolitics presents a rather more plausible story! Khazaria lay between Christian Europe to the West and Islam to the South. By the ninth century, Islam was becoming militant and expansionist and Khazaria lay in its path. Following “the third path” would have seemed like a prudent option. Indeed, it did secure the independence of the territory for some time but by the 11th century, Khazaria was no more and its inhabitants had been integrated into other realms and possibly religions 

One theory has it that some of the Jews moved North and West, into what later became known as Russia and Poland. It is known that there were Jews in those areas before the immigration in the fifteenth century fromSpain and Portugal. There had been Jews in Iberia for a considerable period, at least from the time of the Roman occupation if not earlier, but in 1492 they were expelled. Some moved back East, to Turkey and Egypt but others moved North toFrance thence and to Holland, Germany, Poland and Russia. The Jews of Holland later established trading connections and local communities in the Caribbean and South America 

The Jews from the Mediterranean area are known nowadays as Sephardim from the Hebrew word for Spain; whereas those from Eastern Europe are know as Ashkenazim from the Hebrew word for Germany. Although there are differences in Jewish practice and customs between the groups, these divisions are fairly arbitrary and superficial and do not represent any real Jewish racial or genetic difference. The differences that there are, are almost certainly derived from the local populations by years of intermarriage, rape and conversion. 

As the saying has it, Jews are exactly like everyone else, only more so! 

Article by Dr. David Lawson