Shalom
On Wednesday evening Jews all over the world will be celebrating the New Year and I am sure than many, both Jews and non-Jews, occasionally ponder: what is a Jew?
According to tradition, as Jews are essentially descended from the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (a.k.a. Israel) and his twelve sons and from the Matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel all Jews are part of an extended family or a people, collectively known as Bnei Israel, the children of Israel (Jacob) or Israelites. Genetic testing seems to indicate that there is some validity to this claim.
Furthermore, tradition tells us that on Mount Sinai, together with the Ten Commandments, Moses received the Torah, the written law, and the Oral Law, much later to be known as the Talmud. Led by Joshua the Israelite descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob entered the Land of Canaan where they lived scattered among the Canaanites and the Aegean invaders, the Philistines following their code of religious laws..
More than three thousand years ago the descendants of those twelve tribes united under the leadership of Saul, David and Solomon, the first Kings of Israel. This people with their own unique religion were now also a nation with a Temple in Jerusalem. Civil war split the kingdom leaving ten tribes in the southern Kingdom of Israel and two tribes in the southern Kingdom of Judah.
In 723 BCE the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrian Empire and the descendants of the ten tribes were forcibly exiled eastwards eventually finding themselves as far afield as northern India and Ethiopia from which they have returned to the twentieth century State of Israel.
In 586 BCE the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonian Empire and the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Exiled to Babylon, Iraq of today, they were known as Judaeans or Jews. Like the Assyrian Empire before it, the Babylonian Empire faded into the annals of history, to be replaced by the Persian Empire.
Allowed by the Persian king to return to Judaea (the Latinized form of Judah) and led by Ezra and Nehemiah the Judaeans rebuilt the Temple and when the Greek rule replaced that of the Persians the Judaeans were able to establish the Hasmonean Kingdom of Judaea.
In 63 BCE the Roman Empire replaced the Greek and over the decades the vassal Kingdom of Judaea shrank and lost its independence. In 70 CE, after a failed Jewish revolt against the Romans, the Second Temple was razed by the Romans. Jews were once more exiled, this time westwards, throughout the Roman Empire.
After a second failed Jewish revolt, in 135 CE Rome changed the name of Judaea to ‘the province of Palaestina’. Under Moslem rule this became Jund Falastin and was Anglicized to become Palestine.
Over the next nineteen centuries a remnant of Jews continued to live in their Holy Land while the majority of Jews wandered the world, often welcomed at first but later hounded, expelled or massacred. The trickle of returnees in the nineteenth century has become a flood since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
And we ponder: how is it possible, despite all that befell them, the Jewish people persevered and are returning from the four corners of the earth to the land of their forefathers, reading from the same Torah, practicing the same religion and speaking the same almost forgotten language?
And we ponder: could it be that this enigma and the resultant fear of the inexplicable and somewhat mysterious is one of the causes of anti-Semitism?
