Written by Tara Seidel, current student at Columbia University and former lone soldier in the IDF
The Jewish People are indigenous to the land of Israel. Understanding this preposition lies within clarifying the true definition of what it means to identify as a Jew.
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“What and Who is a Jew” is the eternal question debated amongst non-Jews and Jews alike. This discourse on a wider national level is something that Israel internally struggles to answer itself. One thing however is for certain, to be Jewish doesn’t mean you are simply part of a religion.
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To pigeon hole Jews as mere believers of a faith is a narrow minded and erroneous definition. To be Jewish means you are a descendent of an ancient ethnic group of people with a unique culture, language, tradition, character, land, and history who also happen to have a faith. Jews are too often referred to as just a group of faith. Yes, we have a faith and it is an intricate part of our identity. That being said, to quantify Jewish people as simply believers of a religion is oversimplifying and belittling an incredibly complex and intricately nuanced ancient human ethnicity. If you choose to stop reading at this point just take away one thing from this paper: the Jewish people are much more than just a religion and to believe otherwise is to consolidate thousands of years of a unique nuanced people as only one definable aspect of who they are.
The Jew is one of the oldest indigenous peoples. On a wider scale, there remains room for debate considering who exactly is characterized as a Jew and how one identifies as a Jew. Yet, the Jews are rarely analyzed and studied as one of the oldest indigenous groups despite the existence of archeological findings and recorded history defining the Jewish People as such.
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In no way by exploring this topic am I trying to mitigate the importance and respect I have for the Jewish religion. The religion is part of our nation, yes, but to think of ourselves or for others to think of us as just a religion is amiss and gives people cause to misunderstand why the Jewish People are indigenous to Israel. Yes, it’s true there are a lot of holy Jewish sites in Israel that connect us to our faith. But it is so much more than just a connection to faith that gives us the right to self-determine in Israel. The land of Israel holds the connection to our roots, to the start of who we are as an ethnicity. I cannot emphasize this enough, Judaism is not just a faith, it is an ethnic people who have a culture, history, and language that is idiosyncratic to them. We are indigenous to the land of Israel because the Jewish Nation originated there. The Jewish people are the native people to Israel. Nowadays an emphasis amongst Jewish people is placed on the aspect of the religion. In a way, the Jewish faith is able to codify the culture and history of our nation because through practicing the faith and reading the Bible we are able to experience the life of the ancient Jewish Nation. The Jewish faith is important because it preserves the culture and history of an ethnic people.
For some reason, however when people think of indigenous peoples the Jews are not what comes to mind. Aboriginal tribes from Australia and New Zealand, various Native American tribes, Canadian Inuit’s (Eskimos), to name a few examples, are what comes to mind and what is generally studied as native groups. The history of these indigenous groups is quite melancholic as well as repetitive. Flourishing civilizations that are unique and full of innovation are colonized by European global powers only to have their land stolen by them, be persecuted, enslaved, and dispersed never to be the same again. The history of the Jewish People in Israel is no different! They were colonized, abused, and exiled into diaspora until 70 years ago when the indigenous Jewish people reclaimed their land and revived it! This is absolutely unheard of! For an indigenous group, not to just get reparations from the guilty government whose ancestors stole their land many years ago, but to actually reestablish themselves and to rebuild what they had over 2000 years ago! That is absolutely incredible in its own and the fact that it is rarely studied as an indigenous group reclaiming what is theirs is a mystery to me because that is precisely what it is and should be analyzed as such.
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In order to understand how the Jews are indigenous to Israel the following is a brief narrative of the chronological history of the Jewish People which illustrates how the Jewish People originated in the land of Israel. Those who are history buffs please bear with me as I provide some mundane background as these details are essential in understanding the Jewish People’s origin. Let’s trace back our history to around 3,900 years ago to Abraham, the father of the Jewish People. According to the Bible he followed God’s command and settled in ancient Canaan which nowadays is located in present day Israel and Jordan. In that very land our history and culture began to sprout and flourish. The traditions he embodied in his home of inviting in guests and his wife baking challah and lighting Shabbat candles are things that thousands of years later the Jewish people do today in their homes because it is a part of our ethnic culture. He had his children in that land and then his children had children there until four generations down the line when Abrahams great grandchildren were forced to migrate during a famine to ancient Egypt where they were later enslaved. By the time they were enslaved they were an established ethnic group with their own language and culture that differentiated them from the Egyptians and caused them not to assimilate. After when they were freed and made their grand exodus, their descendants, the Jewish People, were led by Moses back to their homeland. It was on the way in the desert that God granted the Jewish people with a Bible as a guide book and way to live life through a faith. But the Jewish people existed before this faith was given to them. Yes, they accepted the words of God and agreed to practice his Bible, but they did that as a cohesive ethnic group of people. They weren’t codified by the religion, they were already a nation of tribes that were amalgamated by their common ancestor. They had to return back to Israel after the Exodus in order to practice their faith and fulfill their life because that was the land they’re people originated in, where their ancestor Abraham first settled and started a new group of people. The Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel not because of their faith but because of their origin. From the start of Abraham settling there, to his descendants returning with Moses, to them being led by Jehoshua to conquer and resettle in their homeland, to the various kings who ruled thereafter, to the schism into two kingdoms, to the first exile by the Babylonians and the second by the Romans, to the Jewish people that remained after the exile, and the ones who continue to return from the diaspora today. The common motif in all of this is that the Jewish people were always connected to their homeland and always had a remaining presence there.
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The Jewish people’s footprint is found everywhere in land of Israel. From the ancient city of Hebron where our patriarchs and matriarchs are buried to the temple and remaining structures in the city of David in Jerusalem. There has always remained a continuous existence of Jewish people in Israel. At this point I would like to include some quotes from Alan Hertz from his essay “Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People.”
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“Of all extant Peoples, the Jewish People has the strongest claim to be aboriginal to the Holy Land, where Judaism, the Hebrew language, and the Jewish People were born (ethno genesis) around 2,600 years ago. Before then, the Holy Land was home, inter alia, to the immediate ancestors of the Jewish People, including personalities like Kings David and Solomon, famous from the Hebrew Bible. And at that time and still earlier, the Holy Land was also home to other Peoples – like the Phoenicians, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomite’s, and Philistines. But all of those other Peoples have long since vanished from the world. Nobody today is entitled to make new claims on their behalf, including by reason of a supposed genetic descent that is only recently alleged and without basis in history and genome science.”
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“Judaism, the Hebrew language, and the Jewish People were already established in the Holy Land for about a thousand years before the 6th-7th century CE ethno genesis in Arabia of the great Arab People, the birth of which was approximately coeval with the emergence of Islam and classical Arabic.”
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“From the initial Muslim conquest of the Holy Land in the first half of the 7th century CE, Jews there suffered persistent discrimination and periodic persecution. However, neither the Arab People nor subsequent invaders succeeded in eradicating the local Jewish population or bringing an end to the links between the Jewish People and its I aboriginal homeland.”
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I highly recommend Hertz’s essay for further reading and believe these quotes I chose to include further reinforce the point that the Jewish People are rightfully indigenous to the land of Israel.
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Society looks at Jewish people from around the world and sees Jewish people, for example, who are blond and blue eyed from Europe, dark skinned and dark haired from Ethiopia, or caramel haired and green eyed from America and what they see is a group of people who are simply categorized into the same group because of a shared faith. WRONG. Do not accept this narrative. Test those diverse looking people’s DNA and I promise you will find that they are all more similar then the Christian neighbors living next door to the Jewish families in Europe. Why? Because we are a people of ethnic roots who aren’t merely a random group of people with the same faith. We are Semites, we are from the Levant, we are a Semitic people. We are a group of people who share a common cultural background and descent. We are a lineage of preserved ethnicity. An interesting study that supports this was conducted by Dr. Karl Skorecki
who tested the hypothesis “if the Cohanim (Jewish priests who are all descendants of Aharon) are descendants of one man, they should have a common set of genetic markers -- a common haplotype -- that of their common ancestor.” Upon testing the DNA of participants who claimed to be Cohanim from all differing regions of the world a particular marker was found in 98.5 percent of Cohanim. Thus, just reaffirming the fact that the Jews are an indigenous people and not just connected through a faith but literally through their blood and DNA as an ethnic group of people.
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I would be remiss if I didn’t mention to the relevance of the word Palestine in this all. Who are they and aren’t they native to the land as well? As I mentioned previously in 63 BCE the Roman kingdoms under Titus conquered Judea and destroyed the temple a second time and sent the Jews into exile and slavery. This part of history is even depicted and documented on the Arch of Titus in Rome. In 134 CE Roman emperor Hadrian sieged and burned Jerusalem to the ground and renamed the colonized province of Jerusalem as ‘Aeila Capitolina’ and named the land of Judea “Syria-Palestina.” He did this in order to rub salt into the wound of the Jews because not only did he conquer and exile them from their native land he renamed it Palestina after the vanished biblical enemy of the Jews the Philisitines. From them on everyone living in that area was referred to as Palestinian because that was what the name of the region evolved to. Jews, Christians, Arabs, were all referred to as Palestinians. Palestinian Jews were what the Jews who remained in the region were referred to as and what they called themselves. When the British took over the region from the Ottoman emperor after World War I they referred to the land from then on forward as Palestine. Although the Jewish people when granted their rights to self-determine in their homeland decided to change the name back to what is was when their ancestors were there 2000 years prior, the Arabs living in the region kept the name Palestine for themselves even though Palestine was just a name for a region that included all people in that region and was not particular to them. No other state has ever existed in the land of Israel besides Israel. Since the time the Romans exiled the indigenous Jewish People it was passed from hand to hand but remained a conquered territory until today when it is once again in the hands of its rightful owners as an established state.
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One last point that I would like to make is to bring to light a paradox that exists today with the worlds perception of the Jewish people and Israel. In Europe, before World War II, the Jewish People were told to leave Europe because they don’t belong there. In anti-Semitic rallies, there is even photographic proof of them holding signs telling Jewish People to leave Europe and go back to Palestine. Some Jewish People were lucky enough to heed their threatening advice and began to make Aliyah (return to Israel) in the 1800’s and 1900’s and settled there amongst others of the Jewish Nation who had always had a presence in Israel. Nowadays, on college campuses and all around the world Jewish People are told online and in person to “leave Palestine.” The Jewish Nation living in Israel are no longer perceived as a Middle Eastern people. We are called colonizers that steal land from inhabitants and oppress the people that live there. There has been a constant presence of Jewish People in Israel and archeological findings supports this. The anti-Semites don’t want us living amongst them and then when we heed their advice and return to our homeland they then tell us to leave and call us colonizers. The irony in this is not lost.
According to the United Nations in order to be considered an indigenous people you need to meet three specific qualifications. The UN declaration of indigenous people means firstly that your identity was born on that land and in order to fulfill your identity you need to be on that land, secondly that you have always had people from your nation remaining on the land, and thirdly that you self-identify as indigenous. The Jewish people meet all three qualifications. As Jewish people it is essential to identify as indigenous because you are. Change the narrative, rethink who you are. To be Jewish is to be part of a Nation thousands of years strong. It is to be part of a strong and proud history with a unique culture. My hope is that after reading this one thinks Israel and associates Jews as an indigenous people belonging to the land.