Ancient Jews were undoubtedly of Middle Eastern origin. Genetic studies indicate that modern Israelis are close to Kurds, which is consistent with Abraham’s origin from Ur. Several biblical accounts of the “utter destruction” of Amalek conform to the archeologists’ view that Jews slowly infiltrated Canaan rather than conquered it with lightning speed. Genetics shows the resulting affinity between Jews and Syro-Palestinian Arabs.
Ancient sources universally accuse Jews of developing nothing useful compared to the Greek world’s proficiency in arts and sciences. That intellectual gap appeared before the rabbis sublimated the energies of the Jewish people into religious writings. Such absence of intellectual achievement is especially odd in light of compulsory education from the age of five—if we’re to believe Pharisaic accounts of bar Sheta’s reforms. A nation fully capable of reading and writing stood head and shoulders above others in antiquity—but remarkably achieved nothing.
Ghetto Jews of the nineteenth century were thought similarly incapable, and American officials often doubted they could integrate Jewish immigrants. Jews struggled upward, attracted by the opportunities suddenly opened to them, and made tremendous achievements in the intellectual sphere. Since the 1970s, fully assimilated American Jews no longer had to work against anti-Semitism and prove themselves to the outside world. American Jews comfortably settled into the roles of doctors, lawyers, and software engineers, which require no genius. Just like in Ancient Rome, American Jews are becoming wealthy but unproductive in cultural terms.
Centuries of persecution made Ashkenazi Jews a distinct ethnos. The ubiquitous maniac-depressive disorder produced an unusual number of geniuses and many more imbeciles, national cowardice with bouts of desperate bravery, indifference toward others coupled with messianism.
Sephardi Jews are very different visually, genetically, mentally, and intellectually. They are more normal than Ashkenazi Jews.
Ethiopian Black converts to Judaism have no genetic correlation with Jews or Middle Eastern haplotypes.
There are all sorts of odd Jews, like Chabad’s Japanese converts, and we should be happy no Turks yet claim Jewish descent from the Khazar Khaganate, as the Christian Falasha Muras claim Jewish descent and invade Israel.
Face it: some things are irreversible. The ancient Jewish nation cannot be reconstituted. Jews returned from Babylon merely decades after the destruction of our country, but the Second Temple Judaism was forever different from the First Temple life. The Ark, the ten tribes, and the monarchy were lost, and the Levites were probably gone. The Second Temple was a building, not the sanctum. Jews didn’t welcome everyone who professed Judaism: Nehemiah chased away Jews’ pagan wives, who would have surely converted to Judaism rather than leave. The Jews refused to assimilate the Samaritans, whose theological divergence from Sadducean Judaism was far smaller than the gap between modern Orthodoxy and Reformism. Jewishness was never about ethnicity, but neither was it about religion only. Every notion can be carried to absurdity.
The modern Jewish state has lost common sense in defining Jewishness. Yemenite Jews represent a gray area, and though they are utterly underproductive and unsuitable for Israeli society, they are Jewish. Ethiopian blacks, however, cannot become proper Israelis regardless of what religion they profess. Rabbis are slow to adapt their legal rulings reasonable in ghetto conditions. Someone who had a Jewish grandmother and wished to live in a ghetto and suffer like other Jews could be greeted as a Jew, but Slavs with Jewish grandmothes whom their other relatives murdered just shouldn’t arrive in Israel.
For more than three centuries, any European had the opportunity to emmigrate to America. When the state matured, it closed that window of opportunity. Israel doesn’t need American Jewish retirees or victims of Reformist conversions. New immigrants should only be the pioneers willing to settle Israel’s frontiers thirty miles from the major cities.
And it’s time to expel those brought to Israel through rabbinical misjudgment and the government’s urge to have more subjects.