Thus spoke comrade Joseph: "Now, this insistence that the first fact, nay the first truth, that Palestine is the historic homeland of modern European Jews who resided in Europe and not of the Palestinian people who lived in it for millennia, turns out to be neither factual nor truthful, though it indeed remains the primary and first claim made by Zionism and anti-Semitism.
The claim relies on anti-Semitic notions propagated initially by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and later by secular anti-Semitism, both of which insisted that modern European Jews were blood and genetic descendants of the ancient Hebrews respectively, which is precisely how eighteenth century European philology's reference to Jews as "Semites" would soon be transformed in the hand of political and racial anti-Semitism by the late nineteenth century from a "linguistic" category into a "racial" and biological one.
It is based on these anti-Semitic claims - that millenarian Protestants, secular anti-Semites, and Zionists called for the "restoration" of European Jews to the alleged homeland of their alleged ancestors.
The uncontroversial academic and historical facts that European Jews are descendants of European converts to Judaism from the centuries before Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century are unquestionable axioms in academic scholarship, including by Zionist historians.
No respected historian of European Jewry has ever argued that European Jews, or for that matter Moroccan, or Iraqi, or Yemeni Jews, were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. All respected scholars recognise them as descendants of converts to Judaism."
The claim relies on anti-Semitic notions propagated initially by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and later by secular anti-Semitism, both of which insisted that modern European Jews were blood and genetic descendants of the ancient Hebrews respectively, which is precisely how eighteenth century European philology's reference to Jews as "Semites" would soon be transformed in the hand of political and racial anti-Semitism by the late nineteenth century from a "linguistic" category into a "racial" and biological one.
It is based on these anti-Semitic claims - that millenarian Protestants, secular anti-Semites, and Zionists called for the "restoration" of European Jews to the alleged homeland of their alleged ancestors.
The uncontroversial academic and historical facts that European Jews are descendants of European converts to Judaism from the centuries before Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century are unquestionable axioms in academic scholarship, including by Zionist historians.
No respected historian of European Jewry has ever argued that European Jews, or for that matter Moroccan, or Iraqi, or Yemeni Jews, were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. All respected scholars recognise them as descendants of converts to Judaism."
