Prof. John Beaty and the True Origin of the Jews

By Unz Review - RON UNZ • JANUARY 29, 2024.

The overwhelming majority of Beaty’s material had seemed very solidly argued, so his eccentric Khazar claims were naturally seen as his greatest vulnerability, the issue that his bitter critics had focused upon for more than seventy years to discredit the rest of his analysis.

Arthur Koestler, Shlomo Sand, and the Origin of the Jews

Therefore, I decided to take some time to explore the Khazar Hypothesis and the broader question of Jewish origins, partly to evaluate Beaty’s credibility.

When Beaty published his 1951 book, the story of the Khazars had probably been unknown to nearly all Americans, but a generation later another book by a very different writer suddenly brought it to widespread public attention, at least in intellectual circles.

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian Jew, an early Zionist, and a former Communist who later turned strongly against Stalin and soon became a prominent Cold War writer. He was best known for Darkness at Noon, a loosely fictionalized account of the Stalinist purge trials of the 1930s that had deeply impressed me when I’d read the novel in high school. Then in 1976 he published The Thirteenth Tribe, a widely-discussed book promoting the Khazar Hypothesis for the origins of European Jewry, and I recently reread it for the first time since the 1990s.

I wasn’t impressed. Aside from the story of the conversion of their rulers to Judaism, very little solid evidence exists concerning the large Khazar Empire, merely scattered references in the histories and correspondence of their Byzantine, Russian, and Islamic neighbors and rivals, so although Koestler’s short book only ran a couple of hundred pages, it felt heavily padded, substantially summarizing the much better-documented histories of the other regional powers to fill out its pages.

Koestler was a literary intellectual rather than a trained historian or anthropologist, and the efforts he made on behalf of his controversial theory sometimes seemed rather strained to me. All analysts agree that the Eastern European Jews are either the descendants of Jewish migrants from the Rhineland area of Germany or else Turkic Khazar converts. But these Jews call themselves “Askenazim”—meaning “German”—and they speak Yiddish, a German dialect, which contains almost no Turkic words.

Although this evidence does not conclusively establish the Rhineland case, it does tend to support it. Koestler rather weakly tries to explain away those simple facts by arguing that the Khazar Jews were so impressed by the high culture of the Gentile German settlers whom they encountered that they adopted the language of the latter, which is possible but not very plausible.

Furthermore, we only begin to encounter references to the substantial presence of Eastern European Jews hundreds of years after the collapse of the Khazar Empire, so any connection between the two populations seems rather tenuous.

I also wondered whether Koestler’s advocacy might have been partly based upon a personal motive. Before the conquest of their present-day lands, the Magyar tribesmen who founded Hungary had spent centuries as vassals of the Khazars, and when they finally broke free during the ninth century and migrated into Central Europe, a small segment of their former Khazar overlords came with them.

So if Koestler had successfully established his theory, he would have been able to trace his Jewish ancestry to the former rulers of the Hungarian Gentiles of his own country, providing a pleasant psychological boost to the self-esteem of someone raised in the ethnic patchwork quilt of mitteleuropa.

The main argument in favor of the Khazar Hypothesis had been the question of numbers. The Khazar Empire was relatively large and populous, and advocates tend to argue that most of the inhabitants eventually followed their rulers in converting to Judaism, thereby becoming a far more plausible source of the eventual millions of Central and Eastern European Jews than the immigrant Jews from the Rhineland, who probably numbered only a few thousand. But this ignores the reality that populations that find a successful economic niche can grow very rapidly over time.

For example, top Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had ten siblings in his Russian family, and similarly high fertility rates had helped Russia’s Jewish population grow from roughly a half-million around 1800 to a figure ten times larger a century later. So if we know that Russian Jews had increased ten-fold during a single century, a few thousand German Jews might have multiplied a hundredfold during six or seven hundred years.

In a different historical example, today’s many millions of French Canadians and Louisiana Cajuns are all the descendants of just a couple of thousand French settlers who arrived in the New World three or four hundred years ago, while many tens of millions of Americans trace most of their ancestry to a few thousand British settlers who had arrived on the continent around the same time.

Moreover, the very distinct economic activities of the Ashkenazi Jews is another factor strangely ignored both by Koestler and his critics. The Rhineland Jews overwhelmingly filled a minority business niche, being money-lenders and traders among their Gentile host population, and together with estate management and alcohol sales, this was the same sort of occupational profile filled by the much later and larger Ashkenazi populations of Central Europe and the Ukraine. In sharp contrast, the Khazars were fierce Central Asian tribal warriors, and their sudden transformation into a middleman minority earning their livelihood from business and finance seems much less likely.

 Koestler’s book provoked considerable discussion when it was published almost two generations ago, but many of the reviewers were skeptical or even dismissive, so I’m not sure whether it had much long-term impact on the debate. Indeed, some of Koestler’s sharp critics even suggested that he had written it merely in hopes that such a controversial work would revive his public profile which had largely faded away since his early writings of the 1940s had originally established his name.

Far more recent and more influential in mainstream circles has been the widely-praised international bestseller The Invention of the Jewish People by Prof. Shlomo Sand, a dissenting anti-Zionist Israeli historian, whose English translation had been released in 2009, a year after the original Hebrew edition.

Sand’s basic thesis was considerably more measured than that of Koestler, primarily arguing that the majority of present-day Jews both in Europe and elsewhere were probably the descendants of later converts rather than the ancient Israelites of the Bible, with the Khazars merely being one of many such strands. I’d casually read the book about a dozen years ago, and despite the favorable recommendations had been rather unimpressed, but I now decided to reread it.

Perhaps because I was now much more focused on the topic of Jewish origins, my reaction to Sand’s work was far more positive than it had been the first time through.

For example, whereas Koestler had stretched the very thin historical evidence of the Khazars across an entire book, presenting his material in a rather tendentious and credulous manner, a professional historian such as Sand was far more judicious, treating it with considerable caution across 40 pages of text, much of which carefully summarized the conflicting views of many of the leading Jewish historians over the last two centuries.

As Sand explained, mainstream Jewish scholars who held a belief in the Khazar origins of European Jewry had always been a decided minority, but a minority that was both substantial and highly regarded. During the 1950s, Prof. John Beaty had been roasted and vilified in our own country for his endorsement of the Khazar Hypothesis, which was portrayed as a lunatic-fringe belief probably motivated by his hatred of Jews; but during that very same period, Israel’s own Minister of Education was a prominent Jewish scholar holding very similar beliefs.

While Sand does seem to accept that a considerable fraction of Eastern European Jews probably have substantial Khazar roots, he hardly regards the case as solidly proven, nor is it central to his overall analysis, which instead focused upon a wide variety of different conversions to Judaism over the last two thousand years and more.

Some of the conversions emphasized by Sand seem undeniable though previously unknown to a non-specialist such as myself. For example, around 125 BC, King Yohanan Hyrcanus of the Maccabean dynasty conquered the small neighboring Semitic state of Edom and forcibly converted its inhabitants to Judaism.

This history was often embarrassing and under-emphasized by many modern Jewish historians, especially since some of the most important later Judean leaders such as King Herod the Great, various leading rabbis, and even the most extreme Zealots involved in the Great Revolt against Rome were primarily of Edomite convert descent.

Numerous other apparent large-scale conversions to Judaism also took place but voluntarily. Sand gives the background to the later Jewish kingdom of Yemen that survived for more than a century, as well as the very large and flourishing Jewish communities of Alexandria and North Africa in the era of the late Roman Republic, while Cicero had famously remarked in 59 BC upon the substantial number of Jews living at Rome itself.

Judaism was a proselytizing religion during this period, and that fact was almost certainly responsible for the rapid appearance of these large Jewish populations across the shores of the Mediterranean rather than any massive emigration of Jewish peasants from Palestine or any implausibly rapid natural population increase in small immigrant Jewish communities.

Indeed, despite the considerable loss of Jewish life during the revolts against Roman rule, over the next century Jewish numbers reached their high-water mark in the ancient world, perhaps 7-8% of the entire population of the Roman Empire, amounting to many millions. Sand plausibly argues that the rapid expansion of Judaism through conversion had probably begun with Alexander’s conquests and the creation of the large Hellenistic kingdoms that replaced the Persian Empire, and this process had then accelerated with the rise of Rome.

All of this supports Sand’s central thesis that by the time of the late Roman Empire only a rather small fraction of its large Jewish population could trace their roots back to the Israelites of the Bible.

Many of the other facts that Sands recounts seem to have become solidly established in mainstream modern scholarship but had remained unknown to an ignorant layman such as myself.

For example, in the half-century since Israel’s conquests of the 1967 war, waves of determined Israeli archaeologists and historians have made every effort to uncover evidence of the wealthy and powerful Jewish state of King David and King Solomon, but have found almost nothing at all.

This suggests that the story of their mighty kingdom was either entirely fictional or so wildly exaggerated that it amounted to the same thing, with those famous Biblical figures reigning over a tiny, impoverished scrap of territory, so unimportant and obscure that it was totally ignored in the chronicles of the major states of the Middle East and also by Herodotus when he compiled his very hefty regional history a few centuries later.

Consider also the belief that the Jews were expelled from their homeland following the failure of their repeated revolts against the Romans in the first and second centuries AD. This story of the Jewish Exile is probably almost universally assumed by Jews and Gentiles alike, constituting a central ideological pillar for the “restoration” of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel in 1948 and the ingathering of Jews from across the world that soon followed.

However, it has absolutely no factual basis and is accepted by few if any reputable scholars. Although the victorious Romans certainly might have exiled a thin stratum of the vanquished Jewish elites as punishment, they had no policy of deporting entire populations, so the ordinary Judeans who survived their defeat surely remained exactly where they were, merely suffering a loss of political independence.

As Sand persuasively argued, over the centuries many of those Jews eventually converted to Christianity then later to Islam following the Muslim conquest, and they are the ancestors of today’s Palestinians, leavened by an admixture from all the various conquering groups of the last two thousand years, including Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks.

Thus, the direct descendants of the Judeans lived continuously in their homeland before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The tremendous historical irony that the current Palestinians—now suffering horrifying massacres in Gaza—are almost certainly the closest lineal descendants of the Biblical Israelites was highlighted by Sand and had been similarly emphasized by Beaty in his 1951 book.

Although this view might seem shocking to the vast majority of both Gentiles and Jews, certainly including most present-day Israelis, Sand, and Beaty were hardly alone in reaching that conclusion. 

David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, while Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became the country’s second president after the death of Chaim Weizmann, in 1918 as young Zionist leaders, they had co-authored Eretz Israel in the Past and the Present, the most important Zionist book of that era, very successfully released in both Hebrew and Yiddish.

In that work, they summarized the strong historical evidence that the local Palestinians were just long-converted Jews, expressing the hope that they would therefore be absorbed into the growing Zionist movement and become an integral part of their planned State of Israel; Ben-Zvi published a later 1929 booklet making the same points.

It was only after the Palestinians became increasingly hostile to Zionist colonization and began violently clashing with those European settlers that the Judean ancestry of the Palestinians was tossed down the memory hole and forgotten.

Thus, despite a long series of military conquests and foreign overlords, the Israelites of the Old Testament had remained in place for well over two thousand years, annually plowing their fields until they were brutally uprooted and expelled from their ancient homeland by Zionist militants in 1948, a story I had told in a lengthy article last month.

American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 11, 2023 • 14,600 Words

The different elements of Sand’s reconstruction fit together quite snugly. Palestine had never been a very populous land and its inhabitants had overwhelmingly consisted of peasant farmers. Once we recognize that they had remained in place following the failure of their repeated revolts against Roman rule, the large Jewish populations we later find spread across the shores of the Mediterranean basin only become explicable as a result of large-scale religious conversions.

Such a development was hardly surprising given the decline of traditional paganism and the rise of various new cults during those same centuries of the later Roman Empire. Thus, it seems undeniable that the overwhelming majority of the Jews of that era had little if any Judean ancestry.

Sand seems a highly-reputable scholar and his international best-seller was very respectfully treated or even glowingly praised by a long list of mainstream outlets and reviewers, including Israeli ones. But his academic specialty was French history rather than the classical world, and many of his claims about the size and status of the Jews in the Roman Empire seemed so surprising to me that I decided to evaluate them by reading The Jews in the Roman World, published in 1973 by Michael Grant, an eminent British ancient historian.

Although Grant’s emphasis was quite different, his account seemed generally consistent with that of Sand. Population figures from the classical era have considerable uncertainty, but Grant seemed to accept the very large Jewish population spread across Rome’s empire, which he reckoned might have reached a figure as high as eight million, perhaps representing as much as 20% of the total in the eastern, Greek-speaking provinces.

The widespread evidence of Jewish conversions was also heavily documented, although, unlike Sand, Grant believed that Emperor Nero’s second wife was merely sympathetic to Judaism rather than an outright Jewish convert.

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Some of the reviews I read also seemed to substantiate Sand’s important findings. A long article about his book ran on the front page of one of the sections of the New York Times, and the journalist seemed to have contacted various mainstream experts, who confirmed many of the author’s surprising claims: the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine was merely a myth, modern Jews were very substantially the descendants of later converts, and today’s Palestinians were indeed probably the direct descendants of the ancient Judeans.

I was also pleased to discover that the Times writer had focused upon many of the same surprising points I had taken from rereading the text. A comprehensive Wikipedia page provides an even-handed summary of Sand’s book, including the praise he attracted from so many leading Jewish public intellectuals.

Although Sand naturally drew much bitter criticism, especially from Zionists, I noticed that many of the sharpest attacks against his work focused upon his support for the Khazar Hypothesis, although it only constituted a small part of his book and he was cautious in his claims. This closely mirrored the strategy employed against Beaty more than a half-century earlier.

Considering the Genetic Evidence

For centuries, nearly everything we have known about the ancient world has been based upon literary and epigraphic evidence, but over the last generation DNA analysis and population genetics have begun providing additional, potentially far more scientifically objective sources of information. And the nature and origins of world Jewry have been an important target of that newly-enhanced research.

Sand is a historian, strongly committed to his anti-racist beliefs, and an individual with deep Communist roots. When I originally read his book a decade ago, I was surprised that he seemed to almost completely ignore some of the revelations of Jewish origins produced by genetic studies that had recently been in the news and I was therefore quite dismissive of his work when I briefly mentioned it in a 2016 article:

For example, Shlomo Sand’s international best-seller The Invention of the Jewish People was very widely praised in left-liberal and anti-Zionist circles, and attracted considerable attention in the mainstream media. But although I found many parts of the history extremely interesting, the central claim appeared to be incorrect.

As far as I’m aware, there seems overwhelming genetic evidence that Europe’s Ashkenazi Jews do indeed trace much of their ancestry back to the Holy Land, apparently being the descendants of a few hundred (presumably Jewish) Middle Easterners, mostly male, who settled in Southern Europe sometime after the Fall of Rome and took local Northern Italian wives, afterward remaining largely endogamous for the next thousand-plus years of their growing presence in Central and Eastern Europe.

However, being a historian rather than a genetic researcher, Prof. Sand was unaware of this hard evidence, and focused upon much weaker literary and cultural indicators, perhaps also being somewhat influenced by his ideological predilections.

Given the fascination of the Jewish public with their ancestral origins and the fact that so many journalists and genetic researchers are themselves Jewish, it’s hardly surprising that the implications of Jewish DNA analysis have widely separated and been so widely covered in the media.

But when one such Jewish geneticist revealed in 2010 that widely-separated populations of Jews seemed much more closely related to each other than they were to any of the local host populations among whom they had dwelled for many centuries, Sand outrageously told Science Magazine that “Hitler would certainly have been very pleased,” deeply offending that scientist. Heated ideological reactions such as these were among the reasons I’d dismissed Sand’s book when I read it a year or two later.

But after now rereading Sand, I have somewhat tempered my strongly negative appraisal. The author did devote a few pages to discussing the genetic evidence, providing various examples to argue that it had often been skewed by the ideological predispositions of the researchers, while the media tended to promote those studies that supported the Zionist framework and ignore those that challenged it.

So although the author agreed that genetic analysis had “a brilliant future,” he believed that it was still “a relatively young science” whose current findings should be treated with considerable caution. Although I still found Sand’s arguments unconvincing, his position wasn’t quite as anti-scientific as I had remembered it to be.

Ironically enough, as one of the hostile reviewers of his book had noted, many aspects of today’s widely accepted genetic picture seem to strongly buttress Sand’s overall conclusions. The vast majority of the world’s Jews are the European Ashkenazis, and most DNA analysis has concluded that they are overwhelmingly the descendants of a tiny founding population from more than a thousand years ago, whose males were Jewish Middle Easterners but with a large majority of the females being Northern Italian or German Gentiles.

This conclusion thus actually supports Sand’s claim that modern-day Jews had very heavy convert ancestry although their family tree is different than the one he suggested. Meanwhile, those same studies have revealed at most a tiny sliver of Turkic ancestry, seeming to rule out the Khazar Hypothesis that Sand had discussed at considerable length.

For decades, journalist Jon Entine has been heavily focused on these sorts of issues, with his Genetic Literary Project website being devoted to that topic. Several years ago I read his 2007 book Abraham’s Children, which discussed the particular genetics of the Jewish population, and although DNA researchers have made huge strides during the subsequent sixteen years, I decided to reread it.

Although the main focus of Entine’s book was the genetic evidence of Jewish origins, he also devoted part of one chapter to strongly challenging the Khazar Hypothesis on general historical grounds, and I found his arguments quite persuasive.

Although he certainly acknowledges that Khazar converts may have contributed to the ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews—he even finds some scattered genetic evidence to support this possibility—that contribution seems to have been rather small, with the overwhelming majority of the male Jewish line having its origins in the ancient Middle East.

After the formation of the Ashkenazi population, subsequent admixture of the Eastern European Jews with the Slavs and Balts among whom they lived for centuries was negligible, with only 0.5% of the Jewish women in each generation having children with Gentiles.

However, in rereading Entine’s narrative I noticed some items that did seem to support the cautionary arguments that Sand was to emphasize in his book published the following year. According to Entine, the crucial financial backing for the ground-breaking genetic research had come from a wealthy Jewish business tycoon in Britain, who had an intense personal focus on Jewish ancestry and therefore funded a project that seemed to demonstrate that all present-day members of the Jewish priestly caste—the Cohanim—were direct male descendants of High Priest Aaron of the Old Testament.

Moreover, the chief scientist in that effort was a fervently devout Jewish researcher who traced his ancestry to exactly that sacred line. Although there was nothing to suggest that these strong ideological beliefs had skewed their scientific findings, the skepticism of someone like Sand is hardly unreasonable. Indeed a book published several years later by a leading genetics researcher, himself also Jewish, seemed to thoroughly debunk that exciting Biblical hypothesis, which had made global news headlines when it was announced.

That latter short book was Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People, by Prof. Harry Ostrer, published in 2012 by Oxford University Press, which seemed to take a very sober and restrained view of these complex genetic questions. Much of Ostrer’s discussion was historical, and he noted with some irony that the widespread genetic beliefs firmly established by one generation of Jewish scientists were sometimes completely overturned by those of the next generation, only to be just as firmly resurrected by a third generation.

Obviously, under such circumstances maintaining proper scientific caution is quite important. But Ostrer did confirm Entine’s conclusion that the apparent Middle Eastern male ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews and their total genetic dissimilarity from Turkic peoples seemed to virtually rule out the Khazar Hypothesis.

I also purchased and read The Maternal Genetic Lineages of Ashkenazic Jews, a very short 2022 book by Kevin Alan Brook, an independent genetic researcher. Over the years, Brook has become a leading expert on the Khazars, arguing that they provided merely a trivial fraction of Ashkenazi ancestry, and this very recent work seemed to fully cement that conclusion, though in eye-glazing dull fashion: nearly the entire text consisted of an encyclopedic listing of the ancestral origins of the many hundreds of major maternal Jewish genotypes, almost none of which seem to have any significant Turkic component.

For those interested in exploring the subject in greater detail, I would strongly recommend the enormously comprehensive Wikipedia page on the Khazar Hypothesis, which runs nearly 13,000 words including copious references and a large section on the genetic evidence. However, being Wikipedia, we must treat its claims on such a controversial topic with considerable caution.

For example, I noticed that in the Antisemitism section, the article stated that Wilmot Robertson, the founding father of modern American White Nationalism was an adherent, but when I checked, I found that he had dismissed the Khazar Hypothesis as “One of the oldest of racial old wives’ tales,” declaring that it had been conclusively debunked by genetic evidence.

The Wikipedia article also devoted a subsection to the very controversial work of Israeli-American geneticist Eran Elhaik, who has published several papers over the last decade attempting to revive the Khazar Hypothesis, but with a large majority of genetic researchers being sharply critical of his methodology and findings. I read one of Elhaik’s major articles along with a supportive summary, as well as two other papers by leading research teams presenting the mainstream perspective.

My technical expertise in genetic analysis isn’t sufficiently strong to properly evaluate these conflicting arguments, but one of Elhaik’s major claims caught my attention. He contrasted his own “Khazarian Hypothesis” of Jewish origins with the mainstream “Rhineland Hypothesis,” but repeatedly claimed that the latter asserted that Ashkenazi Jews were solely the descendants of the Semitic Judeans, which seems a total misstatement of that position. Instead, mainstream researchers describe those Jews as a hybrid population, perhaps half Middle Eastern but almost half European, a very different assumption.

Population ancestry is commonly analyzed by examining a PCA chart of genetic markers and the one provided in Elhaik’s paper showed that the Eastern and Central European Jews seem to cluster part-way between Europeans and Middle Easterners, exactly as we would expect, and completely distant from the Turks. So I saw nothing that would lead me to doubt the mainstream perspective.

Based upon all this evidence, there seems little indication that the Ashkenazi Jews have any substantial Khazar ancestry, and strong support for the view that they are a hybrid Middle Eastern/European population, exactly as mainstream researchers have long asserted.

Jews as Phoenicians and Carthaginians?

However, in reviewing this genetic evidence I saw an obvious puzzle that seemed to have passed unnoticed in all of the discussions I’d read.

Most mainstream experts seemed to quietly concede that Sand was correct in arguing that by the time of the Roman Empire, the overwhelming majority of the Jews living along the shores of the Mediterranean were probably of convert stock, having little ancestry from the Israelites of Palestine. Yet the genetic evidence painted a very different picture for the major subsequent Jewish populations.

As mentioned, the Ashkenazi Jews seem to derive from Middle Eastern males who took European wives in the centuries after the Fall of Rome. Meanwhile, the Sephardic Jews of Muslim Spain are also of Middle Eastern ancestry, and they were the wealthiest and most numerous component of Jewry throughout much of the Middle Ages before their 1492 expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella.

So if only a small fraction of Jews had roots in Palestine, it appears quite odd that these would have become the progenitors of both the Sephardic and male Ashkenazi lines. Genetic evidence seems to conflict with strong literary and historical evidence.

I think the solution to this apparent mystery comes from considering a very simple question. If millions of pagans across the Mediterranean world probably converted to Judaism during the centuries following the conquests of Alexander the Great and the rise of Rome, we should ask ourselves which pagans were the most likely to do so.

The Greeks dominated the Hellenistic world, and the success and appeal of their culture was so overwhelming that large numbers of the Jews in Palestine became ardent Hellenizers, incorporating pagan elements into their lifestyle and eventually sparking the Maccabean revolt against such detested foreign influences.

So it seems very unlikely that substantial numbers of Greek or Greek-influenced groups would have converted to Judaism when the evidence is that the flow of quasi-converts was far stronger in the opposite direction. The long history of bitter hostility between the very large Greek and Jewish populations of Alexandria further undercuts the notion of numerous Greek converts.

Similarly, the world-conquering Romans of the Republic ruled Palestine, and there seems no evidence that any of them converted to Judaism or found that religion attractive, with Cicero’s remarks suggesting that the Jews were merely considered a disruptive and disreputable nationality. During the early Empire, the Romans brutally crushed several Jewish revolts and although some elite Romans were attracted to the religion, the Jewish population across the Roman world had already become very large by that point, with no indication that it had been swelled by Roman converts.

So if it seems rather unlikely that substantial numbers of either Greeks or Romans had converted to Judaism before the birth of Christ, what was the probable source of the huge number of such apparent converts?

An intriguing possibility presents itself. The ancient Judeans were a Semitic people, closely related in language and culture to the neighboring Canaanites, primarily distinguished by their fiercely monotheistic religion. And by far the greatest and most important of these Canaanite peoples were the Phoenicians, whose coastal city-states included Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, and who centuries earlier had founded Carthage as a North African colony on the coast of Tunisia.

These Punic peoples—the Phoenicians and Carthaginians—were renowned as the greatest merchants of the ancient world, and they had successfully established a far-flung trading empire long before the rise of Classical Greece or Rome, an empire that endured for nearly a thousand years. Their business activities also made them great innovators, and the Greeks credited them with having invented the Alphabet, which was later borrowed and adapted by all other peoples.

The Phoenician cities had eventually been subjugated by the large Semitic land empires of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, becoming tributary vassals, and this status continued under the Persian Empire, which relied upon the Phoenicians to provide most of its navy. But during Alexander the Great’s successful campaign to conquer Persia, he destroyed Tyre and any residue of Phoenician independence was permanently lost under his Hellenistic successors.

By this same era, Carthage had established a large North African empire in the Western Mediterranean, including many colonies of its own, and had probably become the largest and wealthiest city of the ancient world. But during the following century, the Punic Wars against Rome ended with Carthage’s total defeat and the loss of all of its territories, ultimately culminating in its final destruction in 146 BC.

We know that the Israelites had certainly had regular contact with their nearby Phoenician cousins. According to the Bible, King Solomon relied upon the skilled artisans of Tyre for his building projects, and a later king of Israel married into the ruling dynasty of that same city. Although these particular historical incidents seem quite plausible, I think a much more realistic perspective is that the wealthy, sophisticated merchants of Phoenicia regarded the Israelites as their rustic country cousins, probably poor and ignorant and fanatically religious with their monotheistic creed.

However, once Phoenicia had permanently fallen under the alien rule of the Hellenistic heirs of Alexander and the surviving Carthaginians had been incorporated into the empire created by their bitter Roman enemies, it is easy to imagine that many members of both those Punic populations might have gradually become drawn towards a messianic religion such as Judaism espoused by a closely-related Semitic people.

According to modern estimates, Carthage’s North African empire probably included 3-4 million inhabitants at its peak, easily explaining the source of so many of the apparent Jewish converts who later appeared in that same part of the world.

Alexandria was the largest and most sophisticated city in the Eastern portion of Rome’s empire and one-third of its million residents were Jews, often locked in communal strife with the one-third who were Greek. It seems far more likely that these urbanized Jews were the descendants of Phoenician converts rather than Judean peasant farmers who had somehow been transformed into city-dwellers in such huge numbers.

The very large Jewish community in Cyprus off the coast of Lebanon also seems likely to have had similar roots. Indeed, Michael Grant noted that as early as 6 AD a leading Jewish rabble-rouser involved in anti-Greek agitation in Palestine bore the distinctly Punic name of Hannibal.

The Palestinian Jews had no sea-faring tradition nor any history of colonization and were never known as merchants, with their most notable characteristic being their religious fanaticism and the violent rebellions it regularly inspired.

But by the time of the early Roman Empire, we find enormous Jewish populations in coastal trading cities and islands, with Josephus making the (probably exaggerated) claim that 500,000 Jews lived in Cyrenaica on the Libyan coast, not far from destroyed Carthage. How plausible is it that Judean peasants could have migrated to all those distant locations in such large numbers, or had suddenly become the successful merchants and traders that many of these Jews seemed to be?

Outside the vicinity of the Middle East, those regions that later became centers of large Jewish populations were Spain and portions of the North African coast, both of which had been Carthaginian territory, a very suggestive pattern. And even as the Jewish population of the Roman Empire grew larger and became an increasing topic of discussion in the histories of that era, any mention of the residual Phoenicians or Carthaginians became less and less frequent, with those two historical trends possibly being connected.

Furthermore, conversion to Judaism required adult circumcision, a very painful and sometimes dangerous process that functioned as a major deterrent to potential adherents, and by foregoing that requirement, Christianity was able to greatly swell its ranks of Gentile converts. But Herodotus and some other ancient sources claimed that the Phoenicians already practiced circumcision, which would have made it much easier for them to become Jews.

The cities of the Phoenicians were located in present-day Lebanon and much of that country’s population are their direct descendants. For centuries, the Lebanese, whether living at home or in their far-flung diaspora, have been widely regarded as some of the world’s shrewdest businessmen and traders, surely reflecting that Phoenician heritage and its enduring traditions. But although the Jews of Judea never had any such reputation, the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews certainly did, further suggesting that their true origins lay with a different Semitic people.

 Sand spent a few pages discussing the possibility of Jewish converts from among Phoenicians and Carthaginians, but he failed to give the idea the importance it deserved, instead devoting many times more space to the far less plausible Khazar ancestry of the European Jews. Indeed, his discussion was so meager that the issue was never mentioned in the long Wikipedia page devoted to his book nor in any of the reviews that I read.

Although Sand cited a French work from 1962 that had briefly asserted the possibility, I have never seen the hypothesis mentioned anywhere among modern writers. For example, Paul Johnson’s widely praised 1987 bestseller A History of the Jews runs over 650 pages, but neither “Phoenician” nor “Carthaginian” appear anywhere in its index.

Although there seems no indication that this origin theory had ever circulated within the Jewish community, strong sympathy for those other Semitic peoples has been quite common. For two thousand years, Jews have regarded the Romans as their most hated enemy, the foreign nation that conquered and oppressed them, brutally subdued their repeated revolts and demolished their Second Temple, the central shrine of their religion.

But more than a century before it seized Jerusalem, Rome itself had nearly been destroyed by Carthage during the Second Punic War, so throughout history, many Jews have greatly admired that kindred Semitic empire. During that war, the Carthaginians had been led by Hannibal, widely regarded as one of history’s most brilliant military commanders, who repeatedly destroyed far superior Roman armies before the weight of their greater resources finally overwhelmed him.

Hannibal later fled overseas, offering his services to all enemies of Rome, and many years afterward when he was about to fall into Roman hands, he chose suicide by poison rather than captivity, thus explaining the name of the Israeli government’s controversial “Hannibal Directive.” For related reasons, Sigmund Freud explained that as a Jew he had always regarded Hannibal as one of his personal heroes.

So unless modern DNA testing has become sufficiently precise to distinguish the genetics of the ancient Judeans from that of their close Phoenician cousins, I think the latter group should be treated as a leading candidate for the true origin of the modern Jews, including both the Sephardics of Spain and the male line of the Ashkenazis of Eastern Europe.

I wish I could take personal credit for this bold, seemingly persuasive hypothesis that solves many different puzzles, but I can’t. Nearly fifty years ago I happened to read The Outline of History, the sweeping 1920 history of the world by British polymath H.G. Wells, whose narrative stretches from the origins of life to the end of the world war, and he devoted a couple of paragraphs in its 1,200 pages to presenting this exact theory of Jewish origins, which he regarded as so plausible as to almost be self-evidently true.

I found his hypothesis quite convincing at the time and have always been surprised that no one else seems to have ever taken it up in the hundred years since it was first proposed.

John Beaty and the Secrets of American Military Intelligence

In his day Wells had ranked as one of the world’s leading public intellectuals and in a book he published more than a century ago, he briefly sketched out a Jewish origins theory that seems far superior to anything subsequently proposed by other researchers, a theory that should be revived. Sometimes old books contain pearls of wisdom missing in more recent publications.

Admittedly, whether present-day Jews trace their ancestry to the ancient Judeans or instead to a different, closely related Semitic people who lived a few dozen miles north and converted to Judaism two thousand years ago hardly seems of monumental importance. But the content of other old and forgotten books may contain material much more relevant to current controversies.

For example, the work of Prof. John Beaty who produced this article deserves very serious consideration, especially once we recognize that the main criticism of his 1951 text—his espousal of the Khazar Hypothesis many decades before DNA studies had debunked it—was completely tendentious and unfair. Beaty’s extremely strong academic and national security credentials lend considerable weight to all of his analysis of the political events that he had witnessed.

Although much of Beaty’s book was quite controversial, the fierce recent attacks upon his credibility that prompted my investigation of Jewish origins were triggered when I cited a glancing mention he had made about an important historical event:

Beaty also sharply denounced American support for the new state of Israel, which was potentially costing us the goodwill of so many millions of Muslims and Arabs. And as a very minor aside, he also criticized the Israelis for continuing to claim that Hitler had killed six million Jews, a highly implausible accusation that had no apparent basis in reality and seemed to be just a fraud concocted by Jews and Communists, aimed at poisoning our relations with postwar Germany and extracting money for the Jewish State from the long-suffering German people.

Furthermore, he was scathing toward the Nuremberg Trials, which he described as a “major indelible blot” upon America and “a travesty of justice.” According to him, the proceedings were dominated by vengeful German Jews, many of whom engaged in falsification of testimony or even had criminal backgrounds. As a result, this “foul fiasco” merely taught Germans that “our government had no sense of justice.”

Sen. Robert Taft, the Republican leader of the immediate postwar era took a very similar position, which later won him the praise of John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. The fact that the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg had played the same role during the notorious Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s, during which numerous Old Bolsheviks confessed to all sorts of absurd things, hardly enhanced the credibility of the proceedings to many outside observers.

So we find that just a few years after the end of World War II, an established academic whose wartime role had given him the best possible knowledge of American intelligence information casually ridiculed the Holocaust as dishonest wartime propaganda, a fraud already abandoned by almost everyone in the world except for Israel’s government broadcasters.

Moreover, although his 1951 conservative bestseller provoked a wave of ferocious attacks and denunciations by the ADL and numerous other opponents, none of those critics ever challenged his very explicit Holocaust Denial. Indeed, as far as I can tell, Beaty’s disregard or dismissal of the alleged Holocaust seems to have been almost universal among mainstream Western journalists, academics, and public figures throughout the late 1940s and 1950s.

For example, in the 1970s Prof. Robert Faurisson became one of France’s leading Holocaust Deniers, and some years ago he made an extremely interesting point:

Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.

I recently analyzed this striking silence:

As Faurisson emphasized, during the years 1948-1959, Eisenhower, Churchill, and de Gaulle published their memoirs and histories, which totaled more than 7,000 pages. These individuals were the greatest victorious heroes of World War II and the massive works they had published were intended to permanently establish their places in history, not merely for the next few years, but for many decades and even centuries to come.

Mainstream Holocaust scholars have reasonably argued that the event they study was probably the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the world, the rapid extermination of six million innocent victims by one of the world’s most highly-educated countries using diabolically advanced scientific means.

Those three leaders had led the global campaign to defeat the country responsible for the Holocaust, which had only occurred about a decade earlier.

Yet no one reading those 7,000 pages of text would have ever suspected that any Holocaust had even occurred. How can that possibly be explained under the standard historical narrative?

My own contrary explanation is a very simple one. All three of those top leaders knew perfectly well that the Holocaust was merely a hoax, a ridiculous concoction of wartime propaganda. They were sure that within another five or ten years, twenty at the most, the Holocaust hoax would have been completely debunked and universally recognized as absurd, just as had happened with the atrocity-hoaxes of the First World War. So they believed that if they mentioned it in their books, they would be endlessly ridiculed by future generations, and they wanted to avoid that embarrassing fate.

The voluminous, posthumously published diaries of Gen. George Patton and James Forrestal, our first Secretary of Defense, also contain no indication that any Jewish Holocaust had occurred.

 In the decades that followed, other knowledgeable figures became far more explicit and emphatic in their dismissal of the Holocaust.

Consider the case of Prof. Revilo Oliver, a very right-wing but erudite classicist who had been one of Beaty’s wartime colleagues. Oliver had directed a secret research group at the War Department, leading a staff that eventually grew to 175, and he was afterward cited for his outstanding government service.

His concerns about the domestic threat to American society mirrored those of Beaty, and he was friendly with Yale professor Wilmoore Kendall, a leading conservative figure who encouraged William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, two of his young proteges, to found National Review in 1955, with Oliver becoming one of its leading early contributors. A few years later, Oliver also became a founding member of the right-wing John Birch Society, and editor of its monthly magazine, American Opinion.

Given this combination of wartime intelligence work and postwar political activism, Oliver’s 1981 memoirs provided a wealth of important material. He was a man of harsh words, and much like Beaty, he denounced the Nuremberg Tribunals, which he believed had brought everlasting shame upon his own country:

I was, of course, profoundly shocked by the foul murders at Nuremberg that brought on the American people an indelible shame. Savages and Oriental barbarians normally kill, with or without torture, the enemies whom they have overcome, but even they do not sink so low in the scale of humanity as to perform the obscene farce of holding quasi-judicial trials before they kill, and had the Americans — for, given their absolute power, the responsibility must fall on them, and their guilt cannot be shifted to their supposed allies — had the Americans, I say, merely slaughtered the German generals, they could claim to be morally no worse than Apaches, Balubas, and other primitives.

Civilized peoples spare the lives of the vanquished, showing to their leader respectful consideration, and the deepest instincts of our race demand a chivalrous courtesy to brave opponents whom the fortunes of war have put in our power.

To punish warriors who, against overwhelming odds, fought for their country with courage and determination that excited the wonder of the world, and deliberately to kill them because they were not cowards and traitors because they did not betray their nation — that was an act of vileness of which we long believed our race incapable.

And to augment the infamy of our act, we stigmatized them as “War Criminals” which they most certainly were not, for if that phrase has meaning, it applies to traitors who knowingly involve their nations in a war contrived to inflict loss, suffering, and death on their people, who are thus made to fight for their effective defeat — traitors such as Churchill, Roosevelt, and their white accomplices.

And to add an ultimate obscenity to the sadistic crime, “trials” were held to convict the vanquished according to “laws” invented for the purpose, and based on perjured testimony extorted from prisoners of war by torture.

Oliver similarly ridiculed the alleged Holocaust as an absurd, transparent hoax:

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The Americans…were howling with indignation over the supposed extermination by the Germans of some millions of Jews, many of whom had taken the opportunity to crawl into the United States, and…one could have supposed in 1945 that when the hoax, devised to pep up the cattle that were being stampeded into Europe, was exposed, even Americans would feel some indignation at having been so completely bamboozled.

The prompt exposure of the bloody swindle seemed inevitable, particularly since the agents of the O.S.S., commonly known in military circles as the Office of Soviet Stooges, who had been dispatched to conquered Germany to set up gas chambers to lend some verisimilitude to the hoax, had been so lazy and feckless that they merely sent back pictures of shower baths, which were so absurd that they had to be suppressed to avoid ridicule.

No one could have believed in 1945 that the lie would be used to extort thirty billion dollars from the helpless Germans and would be rammed into the minds of German children by uncouth American “educators” — or that civilized men would have to wait until 1950 for Paul Rassinier, who had been himself a prisoner in a German concentration camp, to challenge the infamous lie, or until 1976 for Professor Arthur Butz’s detailed and exhaustive refutation of the venomous imposture on Aryan credulity.

Oliver and Beaty were hardly alone in their views on these important historical events. Prof. Joseph Bendersky was an editor at the Journal of Holocaust Studies, and in 2000 he drew upon his many years of archival research to publish a lengthy book on the anti-Semitic sentiments of our entire Military Intelligence staff during the twentieth century, including World War II. I read it several years ago and described some of my conclusions in a long 2019 article:

Oliver’s peremptory dismissal of the standard Holocaust narrative led me to take a closer look at the treatment of the same topic in Bendersky’s book, and I noticed something quite odd. As discussed above, his exhaustive research in official files and personal archives conclusively established that during World War II a very considerable fraction of all our Military Intelligence officers and top generals were vehemently hostile to Jewish organizations and also held beliefs that today would be regarded as utterly delusional.

The author’s academic specialty is Holocaust studies, so it is hardly surprising that his longest chapter focused on that particular subject, bearing the title “Officers and the Holocaust, 1940-1945.” But a close examination of the contents raises some troubling questions.

Across more than sixty pages, Bendersky provides hundreds of direct quotes, mostly from the same officers who are the subject of the rest of his book. But after carefully reading the chapter twice, I was unable to find a single one of those statements referring to the massive slaughter of Jews that constitutes what we commonly call the Holocaust, nor to any of its central elements, such as the existence of death camps or gas chambers.

The forty-page chapter that follows focuses on the plight of the Jewish “survivors” in post-war Europe, and the same utter silence applies. Bendersky is disgusted by the cruel sentiments expressed by these American military men towards the Jewish former camp inmates, and he frequently quotes them characterizing the latter as thieves, liars, and criminals; but the officers seem strangely unaware that those unfortunate souls had only just barely escaped an organized mass extermination campaign that had so recently claimed the lives of the vast majority of their fellows.

Numerous statements and quotes regarding Jewish extermination are provided, but all of these come from various Jewish activists and organizations, while there is nothing but silence from all of the military officers themselves.

Bendersky’s ten years of archival research brought to light personal letters and memoirs of military officers written decades after the end of the war, and in both those chapters he freely quotes from these invaluable materials, sometimes including private remarks from the late 1970s, long after the Holocaust had become a major topic in American public life. Yet not a single statement of sadness, regret, or horror is provided.

Thus, a prominent Holocaust historian spends a decade researching a book about the private views of our military officers towards Jews and Jewish topics, but the one hundred pages he devotes to the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath contains not a single directly relevant quote from those individuals, which is simply astonishing. A yawning chasm seems to exist at the center of his lengthy historical volume or put another way, a particular barking dog is quite deafening in its silence.

I am not an archival researcher and have no interest in reviewing the many tens of thousands of pages of source material located at dozens of repositories across the country that Bendersky so diligently examined while producing his important book. Perhaps during their entire wartime activity and also the decades of their later lives, not a single one of the hundred-odd important military officers who were the focus of his investigation ever once broached the subject of the Holocaust or the slaughter of Jews during World War II. But I think there is another distinct possibility.

As mentioned earlier, Beaty spent his war years carefully reviewing the total of all incoming intelligence information each day and then producing an official digest for distribution to the White House and our other top leaders. In his 1951 book, published just a few years after the end of the fighting, he dismissed the supposed Holocaust as a ridiculous wartime concoction by dishonest Jewish and Communist propagandists that had no basis in reality.

Soon afterward, Beaty’s book was fully endorsed and promoted by many of our leading World War II generals, including those who were subjects of Bendersky’s archival research. And although the ADL and various other Jewish organizations fiercely denounced Beaty, there is no sign that they ever challenged his explicit “Holocaust denial.”

I suspect that Bendersky gradually discovered that such “Holocaust denial” was remarkably common in the private papers of many of his Military Intelligence officers and top generals, which presented him with a serious dilemma. If only one or two of those individuals had expressed such sentiments, their shocking statements could be cited as further evidence of their delusional anti-Semitism.

But what if a substantial majority of those officers—who certainly had possessed the best knowledge of the reality of World War II—held private beliefs that were very similar to those publicly expressed by their former colleagues Beaty and Oliver? In such a situation, Bendersky may have decided that certain closed doors should remain in that state, and entirely skirted the topic.

Thus, rather than being outliers, the views of Beaty and Oliver seem to have been quite representative of most of our Military Intelligence professionals both during and after World War II. And once we recognize that those individuals with the best knowledge of wartime events regarded the Nuremberg Trials as an absolute travesty of justice and the Holocaust as a ridiculous wartime propaganda hoax, there are enormous potential implications for our present-day world.