So Are the Neanderthals Still Jews?
You read the press reports
in July about the DNA of Neanderthals, and you quickly grasped how the new
findings suggest that this branch of humanoids is much more distantly related
to modern Homo sapiens than you may have believed--they are not even direct
human ancestors. Now you must apply these findings, and examine their
implications for the world around you. Specifically, you must weigh their
effect on certain theories in circulation, among them that Neanderthals still
walk--or lumber--among us, and indeed that they have maintained their cohesion
through the ages and still constitute a group apart. And, most importantly,
that this group of living, lumbering Neanderthals is the Jews.
You
laugh? That may be a mistake. At least two theorists working separately have
concluded precisely this: The Jews are surviving Neanderthals. Laughing at such
ideas suggests you believe them to be absurd. But the validity of such
theorizing is beside the point. What matters is the existence of such a
premise, because it validates the question it seeks to answer: What explains
the Jews? That Jews require a meta-explanation is the problematic premise, one
that even philo-Semites have sometimes fallen for. Anyway, if you laugh at the
idea that the Jews are Neanderthals, what will you do when you learn, as you
shortly will, that the Jews are really aliens from outer space?
Along and extraordinary history of speculation concerns the
ultimate identity of the Jews. In its course, learned fellows have repeatedly
announced they have stumbled on a Big Secret, a hidden truth that explains
Jewish survival, character, behavior, and even the historical antipathy toward
Jews by others. That Big Secret has often been that Jews are not what they seem
to be: This line of thought provides for a certain macabre entertainment, but
it is also a lesson in how the most inane ideas can have the most appalling
consequences. Here is a whirlwind tour of the field, in approximately
chronological order.
The
Jews are a Race of Lepers. An ancient argument in circulation in the first
century. We know of it because Flavius Josephus, the traitorous Jewish general
who joined the Romans, bothers to refute it in his surviving writings. Josephus
attributes the argument to an Egyptian named Manetho who, in a counter-version
to the Book of Exodus, asserted that the Hebrews weren't led out of Egyptian
bondage by Moses. Instead, they were an outcast group of lepers, forced to
settle together, who were eventually chased out of the country by patriots. The
existence of such a story is not necessarily evidence of general antipathy
toward Jews; it is a likely reflection of the long struggle between Hellenism
and the only Mediterranean culture of consequence that held out against it,
Judaism. The idea that Jewish lineage is impure or malevolent reappears in
Visigothic Spain in the early medieval period, and most notoriously in Nazi
Germany.
The Jews are a Race of Devils.
References to the Jews as the children of the devil or as constituting a
"Synagogue of Satan" appear in the New Testament, implying that they are in
league with the devil. That they are themselves actually devils, complete with
horns, is a folk belief that arises in the centuries following the Crusades,
when European Jewry's problems begin in earnest. The survival of such beliefs
into the mid-20 th century is illustrated by Carlo Levi, an
anti-fascist Italian Jew sent into internal exile among dirt-poor southern
peasants in the 1930s. His memoir of exile, Christ Stopped at Eboli ,
describes an encounter with a local woman who refuses to believe that Levi can
be Jewish because he seems to be a person much like herself. Arguments that
Jews are a race of nefarious devils are still being published in the Middle
East, and have been exhibited at Cairo's book fair.
The
Jews are a Separate Creation. "Polygenism," the theory that God created
different peoples in different acts of creation, blossomed during the
Enlightenment. It was in part a "solution" to the "mystery" of Native
Americans, whose startling existence seemed to require some explanation, and
whose status as humans awaited papal resolution. It was also an attempt by
early humanists to challenge clerical authority. They pointed to ambiguous
passages in Genesis that might suggest more than one . Some prominent Jews of
the period saw the hope of popular redemption by supporting such notions.
However, Jew-haters also saw value in the idea, because it allowed them to
regard the Jews as an entirely separate species. French scholar Leon Poliakov
argues that the pseudoscientific foundations of racism were laid in this
debate.
The Jews are an Inferior Race. A
still-familiar concept that arose in the wake of Jewish emancipation in
19 th -century Europe, it argues that Jews constitute a separate
racial group anthropologically inferior to European racial groups. The thesis
attempted to provide a "scientific" rationale for hatred at a time when legal
restrictions on Jews were disappearing. A great deal of detail was presented in
support of the thesis, from relatively tiny cranial capacity to the idea of
peculiar Jewish feet and a peculiar Jewish smell.
The
Jews are Khazars. An idea put into circulation by Arthur Koestler in his
1976 work, The Thirteenth Tribe , it is now widely disseminated among
Jew-haters and anti-Zionists. The argument is that Europe's eastern Jews have
no connection to the Jews of the Bible, but are all descended from the Khazars,
a once-powerful Turkic people who lived near the Caspian Sea and who are known
to have converted to Judaism in the eighth century. Koestler argued from
circumstance, asserting that it is unclear where all the eastern European Jews
came from, that the fate of the Khazars is unknown, and that the solution to
both problems is the same. Among the scant evidence he offered--in all
seriousness--was a chart of noses. The appeal of the argument is apparent: It
enables anti-Semites to embrace Scripture and hate Jews without .
The Jews are Africans. A thesis advanced
by a number of authors, most notably, perhaps, by Yosef ben-Jochannan. His
emotional book, We the Black Jews , is printed largely in uppercase. The
central idea is that white Jews are all impostors, that the real Jews of the
Bible exist, and that they are . Adherents of the idea draw on the Bible for
support, including the often-cited "Black Jesus" passage in Revelations.
The
Jews are Space Aliens. First argued in 1974 by French thinker Marc Dem in
his Les Juifs de L'espace , this thesis holds that Jews are ultimately
space aliens, and that that explains their, um, difficult history. Dem's book
was part of the flood of Ancient Astronaut books inspired by the huge success
of Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? , and appeared here in 1977.
Von Daniken, like many of his imitators, sought evidence for ancient
visitations in the Bible, especially in such passages as the description of
Ezekial's flying chariot. Deducing that the whole of the Old Testament was the
work of aliens is, therefore, perfectly logical.
The Jews are Neanderthals. Advanced in
this decade by heretic anthropologist Stan Gooch, who has also argued that the
original, full-blooded Neanderthals were telepathic. The thesis was taken up
last year by Canadian Michael Bradley in his incoherent book Chosen People
From the Caucasus . Bradley is known for a book-length rant titled The
Iceman Inheritance , which identifies the origins of white racial evil in
prehistoric psychosexual tensions of some sort. Chosen People is an
extension of his ideas: Biblical evidence that Jews are Neanderthals includes
the Esau incident (Esau is hairy, remember?). The reason Jews have an
injunction against portraying God is that Neanderthals cannot draw. However,
Bradley adduces evidence that they were quite good with numbers and were overly
sentimental about their mothers. Interestingly, Bradley also believes that
modern European Jews are Khazars, which means he must argue not only that
biblical Hebrews were Neanderthals, but that so were Khazars. He actually does
so. News that Neanderthals have little in common with modern humankind should
be welcome to admirers of Bradley's work. Among his blurbists, by the way, is
Dr. Leonard Jeffries, of New York's City College.
"It is not my intention to
give anti-Semitism any support whatever," wrote Marc Dem, as he argued that
Jews were from outer space. Certainly not. Arthur Koestler wrote the same thing
in his Thirteenth Tribe , stating that if most of the world's Jews come
from the Volga region, then "anti-Semitism will become void of meaning." Sure.
We're all out here just looking for the Truth. And no matter where we look for
it, over our shoulders among the hominids of prehistory, or out on the
interplanetary horizon, we can find whatever Truths we're looking for: Those
that set us free, and those that prove us mad, too.
