Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning
Nadia is just another WACKademic writing trash jazzed up with academic prose but when you cut through all the padding, it's just another fascist screed.

The Middle East has NEVER BEEN and WILL NEVER BE all Arab, all Muslim.

The Caliphate is just another fantasy like Atlantis.

That's the issue, really, isn't it: the existence and contributions of the many peoples of the Middle East - ancient AND modern.

One would think that acknowledging this awesome and wonderful variety would be a no-brainer.

Is there any way to get Charles at LGF to pick up on this story? It really needs to get out.

The Origins of Modern Jewry ( http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/origins-of-modern-jewry.html )

Against the Rationalization of Zionist Crimes
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Zionists and their white racist Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist supporters justify mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the native Palestinian population by asserting that ethnic Ashkenazim are descended from ancient Greco-Roman Palestinian Judeans or Galileans.

This belief has no connection to the facts as many Jewish studies scholars will admit in private. At an MIT lecture I asked Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen about the ancestral connection of modern ethnic Ashkenazim to ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot of conversion since Greco-Roman times (whatever conversion meant in Greco-Roman times). In 2002 Marc Ferro published Les Tabous de l'histoire, which discusses in detail the conversion to which Professor Cohen referred.

Conversion is not the only process that deterritorialized Judaism. The Hasmoneans and Herodians seem to have pursued a policy of bringing as many worshippers of the high God El as possible within the fold of the Jerusalem Temple in order to improve the Judean kingdom's finances. El was Kronos to the Greeks and Saturnus to the Romans. In Hellenistic Tyre El Kon-Artz (El Creator of the Earth) was worshipped as El Kronos.

At the time of Jesus the vast majority of El-worshippers, who were adherents of 2nd Temple Judaism, probably had no ancestral connection whatsoever to Greco-Roman Judea, Persian Yehud or ancient Judah.

In very careful analysis of the sources, Seth Schwartz argues in Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. that by the end of the 2nd century 2nd Temple Judaism was completely shattered. He argues that the Constantinian Church reconstructed late Roman Judaism. In a way Shaye Cohen agrees because in The Beginnings of Jewishness he dates the origin of Jewishness as we understand it today to the 4th century.

In Schwartz's analysis Cohen's dating is probably too early because Talmudic/Geonic Judaism is not clearly the dominant current in late Roman Judaism, and Judean Christianity, which treats Jesus as messiah but not as God or son of God, still has many adherents throughout Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix (Hijaz). Such Judean Christians view themselves as practicing some form of Judaism, and no Jewish group has a well-defined position on matrilineality or on conversion practices within the Judaism of this time period.

As the Christian late Roman Empire gradually retrenches or breaks down, the Khazar Kingdom rises in Southern Russia and flourishes from the seventh through tenth centuries. The wealth of the Khazar kingdom seems to have been based in trading Slavs and members of other Southern Russian ethnic groups as slaves first with the Byzantine Empire and then with the early Islamic Empires as well.

Trading in slaves in that time period cannot be equated with human trafficking today. Ancient servitude like later Islamic or Ottoman slavery could provide social mobility, confer political authority and give social status to members of an alien immigrant population. Ehud Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Khazar, Byzantine and early Islamic slavery was probably closer to the later Ottoman system.

Dealing with the Christian and Islamic Empires put pagan Khazars in a tricky position. Some seem to have converted to Christianity and Islam, but such conversion may have created problems for the slave trade because as Christians or Muslims, the Khazars would have had an obligation to convert Slav subjects to either Christianity or Islam and incorporate them into the community. Slaving in such a situation is quite problematic. That time period's Judaisms, which were far less committed to proselytization than Christianity or Islam, for the most part made strong distinctions between members of the community and gentiles as well as between Hebrew slaves and Canaanite (gentile) slaves. Starting in the 8th century (or maybe earlier) the Khazars began to convert to Judaism, and by the 10th century the Khazar Kingdom officially practiced Judaism. For the entire Middle Ages, Rabbinic Jewish literature consistently refers to Eastern Europe as Kanaan -- I presume -- because Eastern Europe was a source of Slavs who were treated legally as `avadim kanaanim (Canaanite slaves).

In contrast with Ibero-Berber Jewish naming practices, which often include Talmudic Aramaic names consistent with the occasional immigration of Jews from Babylonia to Spain, Khazar Jewish names show the typical convert pattern of choosing names out of scripture as described in the work of Columbia Professor William Bulliet. Archeological investigation finds mixed Turkic pagan and Judaic graveyards with the earliest such mixed graveyards in Southern Russia and the later such graveyards in the Balkans and Hungary. Archeologists have also found coins with Turkic and Hebrew inscriptions in Hebrew-Aramaic letters. There is no textual or epigraphical evidence of knowledge of Arabic or of Aramaic among Southern Russian and Eastern European Jews of the 10th century or earlier as one would expect if they or near ancestors were immigrants from Palestine or Mesopotamia.

The Khazars corresponded with the Geonim, who seem to have been willing to adjust the sacred law to fit the slave trade in exchange for economic support. Such accommodation is probably the origin of Medieval Rabbinic Judaism as Khazar slavers needed a codified legal system, and Khazar contributions made it possible for Geonic Judaism to dominate and finally absorb other forms of Judaism at the same time that many members of non-Khazar Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean region, Germany and France became agents of the slave trade either directly or through finance, tax farming, medicine or estate management, which were professions supported almost entirely by the slave trade in the early Medieval Period. The Jewish slavers that accompanied William the Conqueror to England seem to have been of Ibero-Berber origin and not of Khazar background.

Matrilineal non-proselytizing Medieval Rabbinic Judaism proved exceptionally friendly to the Slavic slave trade. Medieval centers of Rabbinic Jewish learning thrived along with the Slavic slave trade while Medieval Karaites were probably the last holdouts against the Geonic accommodation. Karaite centers declined and tended to be in rather isolated parts of the world.

Amitav Gosh translated a lot of Geniza documents written by or about a Jewish slaver in India. The book is called In an Antique Land, and Gosh is somewhat diffident about describing his subject's source of income.

This Khazar hypothesis complements the Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et Charlegmagne) as well as some of the proposals of Crone, Cooke, and Nevo about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren). The spread of various forms of Judaism to Southern Russia probably explains why St. Kliment of Ohrid gave many Cyrillic letters forms similar to those in the Hebrew Aramaic alphabet. Members of a non-Rabbinic Jewish group probably created the Slavonic book of Esther while Bogomili Christianity and Catharism were probably brought westward by Slavic slaves that practiced evolved forms of Judean Christianity, no longer recognized as Judaism by Rabbinic Jewish Khazars.

As the Slavic slave trade expanded the Jewish traders probably needed to free semi-proselyte Slavic slaves to assist in the business. A similar process took place in West Africa as the Black African slave trade expanded. In Germano-Slavic territories where Sorbian and Polabian were spoken, the Slavo-Khazar traders, who initially probably used Sorbian and Polabian, had incentive to relexify their Slavic dialect to German in order to trade with dominant German-speaking populations and to separate themselves from pagan and Christian Sorbian and Polabian. During the 9th-13th centuries this process created an older form of Yiddish, which became the West Yiddish dialects of German territories. During this time period, as the Slavo-Khazar Jewish population becomes larger and more important within the Jewish community, Arabic dies out as a language of religious discourse among non-Khazar Rabbinical Jews.

As the Khazar traders reconstructed trade routes or created entirely new trade routes, Khazar and non-Khazar Jews develop distribution networks for goods unrelated to Slavery. In Spain the Jewish non-Slavery-related trade does not seem to have been highly valued because Spain expelled its Jewish population within 50 years of the shutdown of Slavic slave trade in Mediterranean Christian countries as a consequence of the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople.

The development of sophisticated heterogeneous distribution networks by Jews in Poland made Commonwealth Poland a wealthy world power while Jewish estate management, finance and tax farming remained important and often thrived in Poland even after the complete shutdown of the overland Slavic slave trade by the end of the Wars of the Reformation.

As Jews from the German territories migrated Eastward because of the Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation, the Slavic Kiev-Polessian dialects of the Slavo-Turkic Eastern European and Southern Russian Jewish populations (with the exception of certain isolated communities in Slovakia and the Sub-Carpathian region) were relexified to West Yiddish to create East Yiddish dialects. Paul Wexler explains the vocabulary of Yiddish in Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish without proposing any historical reasons for the process. The work of Alexander Beider and other specialists in onomastic studies also demonstrate a westward migration of Eastern Slavic-speaking Jews. Some of the linguistic development of East Yiddish may have taken place in German territories.

By the 17th century practically all consciousness of the Khazar kingdom was lost among Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews constitute a distinct Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group. During the German economic depression during the century after the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), there was considerable mixing of impoverished German Christians and German Jews, and many Jews probably passed into the Christian community while some Christians were probably absorbed in the Jewish community. During the same time period, as Poland collapsed after the Chmielnicki Rebellion (1648), Polish Prussia came under German rule, and German Jews began to develop some familiarity with the Polish estate system. Thus even after the crystallization of Ashkenazi ethnicity, the boundary between German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim has never been particularly solid.

This article seems to conflict with genetic anthropological studies of Hammer, Oppenheim and similar people but these studies are severely flawed as Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh and I point out in http://tinyurl.com/3e4xby . A recent article by Talia Bloch in the Forward ("One Big, Happy Family," Aug. 22, 2007, http://www.forward.com/articles/11444/ ) indicates that even some of the most extreme Zionist genetics researchers are beginning to concede that ethnic Ashkenazim are a separate ethnic group distinct from other Jewish groups except insofar as members of ethnic Ashkenazi communities or related Eastern European and Southern Russian populations have been exported to non-Ashkenazi communities in the past.

The rationalization of Zionist crimes against Palestinians on the basis of some sort of modern Jewish ancestral connection to ancient Palestinian populations has always been unethical, but even those that believe genes confer superior rights to one group over another must concede that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists in Palestine are murderous genocidal thieves and interlopers.

Joachim, too bad for you and the rest of your klan that the Israelis are NOT the unarmed Jews of WW2 nazi filth infested Europe.

Did you watch Ken Burns "The War"? I got a kick out of seeing your heroes pushed back and surrendering, unconditonally, on May 7, 1945.

Martillo working to promote the legitimacy of Nadia el-Haj's scholarliness is like David Duke supporting Jimmy Carter's thesis of Apartheid in Israel and Mearshimer&Walt's medieval fantasy of the Israel LOBBY. The more support the former give, the better to deligetimize the latter's work ..

"At an MIT lecture I asked Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen about the ancestral connection of modern ethnic Ashkenazim to ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot of conversion since Greco-Roman times"

'I know this guy and he told me this and that, and that means it's the real deal' ...PUUUUULEEEEZE!

Why is it so easy to find people who try to cherry pick 'scientific facts' in order to justify a sick inner compulsion.

Hey, I know... I have a black friend who teaches college and he told me all black guys..... but that's why they are all dumb !

What kind of moron believes this kind of stuff?
The kind that needs to.