Second post collecting together related ideas from an earlier comment section, building a model for why there as an explosion of conversion to (mainly Talmudic) Judaism during the Dark Ages, where it happened, and when it happened, surveying a very broad range of Jewish communities.
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As far as I can tell, there was no mass migration of Judaeans out of Judaea during / after the collapse of the Roman Empire. They mostly stayed put, first converting to Christianity, and then to Islam. Their descendants are today's Palestinians, regardless of their religion.
Where did all these Medieval Jewish groups come from, then? They were mostly converts or adopters, a process that happened in many places independently of each other -- e.g., Sephardic Jews in Iberia and the Maghreb, and Ashkenazi Jews within the Khazar Empire (mainly, the non-Turkic subjects of the Khazars).
There's no evidence that any of these Medieval Jewish groups ever spoke a Semitic language, let alone Hebrew or Aramaic, which the Second Temple Judeans did. They kept their language from pre-conversion -- Old Spanish (Ladino) for the Sephardics, Farsi for the Persian Jews, and some Indo-European pidgin (Yiddish) for the Ashkenazis. Most of their culture remained the same as well -- only their religion changed.
Why did so many groups, separated by so much space, simultaneously adopt Talmudic Judaism? I think this was an attempt to forge a Third Way religion, a Non-Aligned Movement of its time, in the broader context of the expansion of Christianity and Islam.
Christianity was spreading via the Byzantine and Frankish Empires first and foremost, but secondarily through the Nestorian Church / Church of the East in Sasanian / Abbasid territory. Islam was spreading via the first Arabian Caliphate, and later successors like the Abbasid, Moorish, Fatimid, and various Turko-Mongol ones (like the Seljuks, Ottomans, Timurids, etc.).
Cuius regio, eius religio -- if you threw in your lot with a certain polity, you had to adopt their religion as a pledge of allegiance. If you wanted some kind of political autonomy, you had to adopt a non-aligned religion -- you weren't siding with any of the Christian empires, nor with any of the Muslim empires. Non-aligned, Third Way -- Talmudic Judaism!
Crucially, though, Talmudic Judaism could position itself as overlapping in interests with both sides, as it was a fellow Abrahamic religion. And its ancient prophets were still being looked up to by both Christians and Muslims. Talmudic Judaism did not precede Christianity, but in harking back to Second Temple and earlier stages, it could claim to precede Christianity and Islam -- hence, setting itself up as a dispassionate, wise elder that could adjudicate between the younger squabbling children, Christianity and Islam.
Forgot to mention the Bulgarian Empire as the other major vector for Christianity's expansion, in Eastern Europe / Slav-dom (Kievan Rus' played little role in this -- Old Church Slavonic is really Old Bulgarian, a Southern Slavic language, not Old Russian / Ukrainian / etc. from Eastern Slavic).
This matches with the geographic distribution of Medieval Jewish groups. They're on frontier zones between Christian and Muslim empires, where the pressure to remain non-aligned would have been greatest.
If the region were mainly Christian, the pressure is simply to adopt Christianity -- there's no Muslim presence that would justify your Third Way religion, as a triangulation strategy. And vice versa in regions that are primarily Muslim -- with no Christian presence, there's no logic to a Third Way religion. At least not where that Third Way is Talmudic Judaism.
The only Jewish empire ever -- the Khazars -- were smack dab in the middle between the Christian and Muslim spheres of influence, around the Caucasus mountains and sprawling toward the north, with Christianity to the west and Islam to the east.
Ashkenazi Jews emerged from the Khazar Empire, as did the Turkic off-shoots of the Khazar elite like the Krymchak Jews of Crimea.
Sephardic Jews came from the frontier between Christian Iberia and the Muslim Maghreb. I consider Maghrebi Jews to belong to the same group, with the only difference being language -- the adopters from Iberia kept speaking Old Spanish (Ladino), while the adopters from the Maghreb side kept speaking Maghrebi dialects of Arabic / Moroccan / Berber languages.
Jews in North Africa vanish as you move away from the Christian frontier of Iberia -- e.g. in Libya, where there were mainly Muslim polities, and no room for a Third Way to emerge.
Likewise as you move toward Northwestern Europe -- no native Jews, since France and Britain and Germany were entirely Christian, no Muslims nearby, hence no way for a Third Way to emerge. This also reinforces the view that the Ashkenazis do not hail from Germany, where there was no way for a Third Way to emerge, but originally from a region with a strong Muslim presence nearby, like the Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Caucasus, etc.
Ethiopian Jews lie on a frontier between the Christian parts of Ethiopia (in the north / west) and the Muslim parts of Ethiopia and Somalia (in the south / east). So do the Yemeni Jews, who are just across the Red Sea from historically Christian Ethiopia, but also have Muslims nearby in Somalia as well as all of Arabia.
There's a tiny pocket of Egyptian Jews, at the confluence between Muslim North-central and Northeast Africa and Arabia, and the semi-Christian Levant and nearby Anatolia and Greece.
Mountain Jews reflect the same position as the Khazar and Ashkenazi Jews, around the Caucasus between the Christian west and Muslim east.
Persian Jews come from the old days when Nestorian Christianity was expanding and at its peak in Iranian-controlled lands, which included Mesopotamia and into Afghanistan and the southern part of Central Asia. They were positioning themselves between the early Muslim Abbasid rulers and the Nestorian Christians, especially in western Iran and Mesopotamia. But also further east into Afghanistan (Herat -- not so much further into Kabul, where there were few Nestorians), Samarkand, etc.
However, Nestorian Christianity disappeared during the early 2nd millennium, and Iranian lands became fairly uniformly Muslim, so the logic of the Third Way bit the dust as well, so that Jews from Iranian lands are much rarer than in other places as a result.
A fascinating example are the Cochin Jews of Kerala in Southwestern India, which not surprisingly happens to be the only state in India with both a substantial Muslim population (stemming from seaborne Arabian traders, not land-army invaders from the north), and a substantial Christian population (Nestorian, naturally, having received missionaries from Sasanian / Abbasid empires). In the 21st C, Muslims are about 25% and Christians 20% of the population of Kerala. As always, these Cochin Jews speak the same language from their pre-conversion days -- Malayalam (a Dravidian language), not Hebrew, Aramaic, or other Semitic language.
This establishes the tight spatial correlation between a faultline between Christian and Muslim empires, and adopting Talmudic Judaism (or in a few cases, Karaite Judaism -- also not Second Temple, but very much a modern-era LARP to RETVRN to pre-Talmudic ways, in the same way that Christian fundamentalists are thoroughly from the modern era).
But the temporal correlation is there as well. None of these groups practiced any strain of Judaic religion before the Dark Ages, and crucially, before the rise of Islam in the 7th C. Talmudic Judaism itself was only codefied around 500 AD. But there was no initial explosion of Talmudic Judaism in the 6th or even 7th centuries -- more like the late 1st millennium.
That is, after Muslim empires had expanded to such a broad extent, as well as the broad expansion of Christian empires in the west (which did not happen during the Roman days, or even just afterwards -- the major Germanic polity and culture, the Saxons, didn't adopt Christianity until conquered by the Frankish Empire circa 800 AD, also the time that the Slavs began adopting Christianity via the conversion of Bulgarian Tsar Boris I "the Baptizer" in the mid-9th C).
And we can infer the date of their conversion fairly tightly in some cases, like the Sephardic Jews, whose Romance language (Ladino) is a dialect of Old Spanish -- before the Castilian-led ethnogenesis, and imperiogenesis, during the Reconquista of Iberia from the Moorish Empire. It's not a dialect of Iberian late Vulgar Latin or whatever, so it's not from the early portion of the Dark Ages either.
It's from the late 1st millennium, and it is therefore more similar to Portuguese and Catalan, which were not the leaders of Spanish ethnogenesis, and did not radically revolutionize their language in order to signal that this was a whole new ethnic group being born, with a new set of shibboleths by which to identify each other.
E.g., Ladino, like Portuguese and Catalan, still uses sibilant consonants in the places where Castilian ("Spanish") transformed them into "th" at the front of the mouth and "kh" at the back of the mouth.
Which sectors of society did this Third Way strategy appeal to most? Apparently the merchants, traders, financiers, and the like. They are the least political, wanting to be left alone to hawk their wares, supervise trade routes, move the stuff along trade routes, lend money and collect loans, etc.
This government, that government, this state religion, that state religion -- who cares? I just wanna control the trade routes between them, and not get involved in their military or religious disputes.
It did not appeal to the military, which has the strongest interest in picking one side of an imperial fault-line. They're going to be the ones defending or expanding that fault-line. Jewish soldiers and Jewish jocks are the exception that proves the rule.
Nor did it appeal to the religious officials, for obvious reasons. They're there to serve the existing major religion of their empire, not abandon it for some strange foreign religion, and for no good reason (like accepting their conquest by foreigners). Jews for Jesus are another exception that proves the rule.
Didn't appeal to landed gentry / landowners / cultivators either. Perhaps cuz this sector was heavily intertwined with the military and religious sectors during the Dark Ages. The central state was fairly weak, so most armies were fielded by landed aristocrats, and the church / mosque owned a lot of productive land. Jewish hardscrabble farmer living off the land in nowheres-ville is another exception that proves the rule.
This is why Talmudic Jewish adopters were more urban than rural -- and remain so right up through the present day.
I'm leaving aside the genetic angle for the most part, since we're talking about cultural in-groups and their evolution, not tracking genetic populations over time.
But in any case, the genetic evidence is very weak for the view that Medieval Jews (and their modern-day descendants) represent a demographic migration out of Judaea, i.e. stemming from the practitioners of Second Temple Judaism and perhaps the even more distant ancestors of Second Temple Jews.
There has been a ton of admixture in every Jewish group, which confounds attempts to shed light on who their ancestors were, and especially *when* the admixture occurred. Admixture, when two distinct genetic populations start having babies with each other, wipes out a ton of the historical record on BOTH sides, rendering the merged resulting genome a lot more difficult to decipher for historical purposes.
Just like, on the cultural side, when two languages start to heavily influence each other -- a ton of old words are lost on BOTH sides, wiping out a huge swath of the historical record for BOTH languages. While not making it impossible to peer into their respective histories, it does confound the hell out of the attempt.
I think the general pattern can be seen in this recent article on Medieval DNA from a 14th-C. Ashkenazi Jewish cemetery in Erfurt, Germany.
Below the Summary section, is a Graphical Abstract. Note the graph in the middle, showing where the individuals cluster in a simplified genetic space. It shows two distinct sub-populations -- and this is confirmed in the results section by tests of bi-modality, i.e. two distinct distributions with each having a peak of its own, not just one great big happy distribution with a single peak.
In the post-Medieval era, present-day Ashkenazi Jews no longer have a bi-modal genetic cluster pattern, they're a single genetic population, which lies between the two separate ones from the Medieval era.
I interpret this to reflect that at their origins, the Ashkenazi Jews were unified on a cultural basis, like an economic niche of controlling trade routes, developing a pidgin / lingua franca like Yiddish, and being fellow subjects of the same empire (Khazar), who had recently adopted a new religion (Talmudic Judaism). They transmitted these aspects of their culture throughout the generations.
But at first, they were not genetically unified -- that only followed later, after their cultural unification / standardization. They figured, Hey, we're all following the same religion, speaking the same language, practicing similar economic roles, hailing from the same regional roots -- we might as well merge our families and clans, to cement and protect our special status as Third Way religionists and economic specialists.
And so they did -- and nowadays, the Ashkenazis are one single genetic population.
In the Medieval era, one of their sub-groups was more European -- meaning Slavic or perhaps Balkan Greek or West Anatolian Greek, not Germanic. And the other sub-group was more "Middle Eastern" -- a weasel deflecting term to insinuate they're Judaean or Levantine or Semitic without the evidence to back it up. In reality, more of an East Anatolian Greek, Caucasus region, or Iranian strain of "Middle Eastern". Not Semitic, nor any other Saharo-Arabian population.
These two sub-groups both had the same idea in the Khazar Empire -- why don't we specialize in a certain economic role, and adopt this Third Way religion so we remain neutral (but similar to both sides) in international trade routes, diplomacy, finance, and other mercantile and bureaucratic activities? It didn't matter that one was more Slavic and the other more Iranian. Politics makes strange bedfellows -- culturally at first, and later perhaps literally, as in this case.
With other groups of Jews, the story is presumably similar or more extreme.
The extreme cases are unadmixed populations, where we can directly see that they're just converts from the local genetic population. This is the case for Turkic ones, like the Krymchaks of Crimea. And the Yemeni Jews. And the Ethiopian Jews. And the Persian Jews.
The other major case of an admixed Jewish group is the Sephardics, who are a merger between Iberians and Maghrebis, i.e. the two relevant sub-groups under the control of the Moorish Empire, which straddled the Strait of Gibraltar, including much of Iberia and the Maghreb at the same time.
If some researcher discovers Medieval DNA from a Jewish cemetery in Cordoba or Tangier, and compare it to today's Sephardics and Moroccan Jews, the picture will presumably look like the Ashkenazi one linked above -- a bi-modal genetic cluster pattern during Medieval times, and a more uniform one among present-day descendants. Cultural unification and standardization first, then familial mergers and genetic admixture, after they've grown comfortable and familiar with each other within their Third Way cultural enclave.
Forgot to mention the Cochin Jews as another obvious case of conversion among the local genetic population. They look and speak exactly like their non-Jewish neighbors in Kerala.
We have to emphasize all of these extreme cases cuz the propaganda goes that "Judaism does not proselytize or welcome converts easily", as though to suggest that today's Jews are a latter-day Judaean diaspora.
The more examples we find of obvious local converts, the more that propaganda implodes. The main arguments are about the Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups not being Judaean, but there are all sorts of lesser examples from far-flung regions that, collectively, bolster the argument about a wave of conversions across the Christian-Muslim faultline during the late 1st millennium AD, independently of each other but for similar reasons (convergent evolution, not identity by descent). And not a mass migration from Classical Judaea to these many distant lands.
Another major weakness of genetic data is that determining who resembles who else, is highly sensitive to which groups are included in the comparison! Leave out the very diverse genetic populations of the Caucasus region, for example, and you can't conclude anything about Ashkenazi Jews *not* coming from that region. Or don't include many Persians, etc.
Here's an article reviewing these important points, and arguing for Ashkenazis coming from a Slavic, Iranian, and (weakly) Turkic genetic and geographical origin.
When you include a fuller, richer sample of eastern Anatolia, Iran, northern Mesopotamia, and all around the Caucasus, the results returned are Ashkenazis being something like 25% Caucasian, a conclusion that does not appear when this region is poorly and thinly sampled relative to the Levant.
When the Levant is heavily sampled, this makes them the only logical place for Ashkenazis to resemble in their "Middle Eastern" component. It's just baking in the desired result ahead of time, circular reasoning.
And again, admixture confounds the attempt to decipher genetic population history. So even to the extent that Ashkenazi Jews *do* somewhat resemble Semitic-speaking Levantines, we can't infer that this reflects a shared ancient Semitic common ancestor. Caucasus / Iranian DNA began flowing into the Levant well before the Classical era.
So perhaps the resemblance between Ashkenazi Jews on the one hand, and Lebanese or Palestinian Christians on the other, is simply pointing to them both having a very old Caucasus / Iranian bunch of DNA -- in the Ashkenazi case, cuz they're from that very region and didn't migrate, and in the Lebanese or Palestinian case, cuz they received migrants from that region several thousands of years ago.
Clustering graphs in principal components analysis, don't tell us how they came to share their genes, or when their common ancestors lived.
This is where cultural analysis excels, since the record is far richer over history -- whereas finding Medieval or Ancient or Prehistoric DNA is very very rare, in comparison. Especially since the relevant cultural groups here are all literate and from sedentary or semi-sedentary civilizations, with recorded histories.
Ashkenazi Jews are never recorded as speaking Hebrew, Aramaic, or other Semitic language, as their first, everyday language (only for liturgical purposes -- but that no more establishes their deep ancient affinity with Judaeans than the descendants of the Aztecs "preserving" Latin as a liturgical language, connects them genetically to the Romans or Byzantines).
Whereas Lebanese, Palestinians, etc. in the Levant never stopped speaking Semitic or more broadly Canaanite languages, from antiquity to the Dark Ages to the present.
Conclusion: Ashkenazis are not a diaspora that originated in the Levant. Neither are the Sephardics, who also never spoke Hebrew or Aramaic.
What about the genetic argument about "Jews resemble each other more than their local populations"?
Well, first, there are numerous examples against this dum-dum canard -- Ethiopian, Yemeni, Krymchak, Mountain (Caucasus), and Cochin Jews.
This argument really relies on the Ashkenazi and Sephardic cases. Iranian Jews have the lowest genetic relatedness to other Jewish groups, meaning they're another obvious case of local converts.
Ashkenazi Jews resemble each other more than their host populations cuz they are a unique admixture between a Slavic and an Iranian ancestor population -- who the hell else can boast of a similar lineage since the Medieval era? Nobody. Hence why they resemble each other so much, also having been endogamous ever since.
Likewise for Sephardics -- they are a unique admixture of Iberian and Maghrebi source populations, which means they resemble each other more than they resemble the relatively unadmixed descendants of Iberians and Maghrebis, among their neighbors.
So why do Sephardics and Ashkenazis resemble each other, then? They have a different set of source populations that they're admixed from. Well, not so much -- Iberians are western Indo-Europeans from the Mediterranean, and so are Greeks and Southern Slavs. This could be the shared DNA between Sephardics and Ashkenazis, respectively.
They are also highly admixed with a genetic Middle East / North Africa component, unlike Iberians or Greeks or Slavs. So perhaps their similarity is a result of having Southwestern Indo-European DNA, with a notable MENA DNA mixture as well, even if this MENA source is different for Sephardics and Ashkenazis -- it's still a point of commonality between them, which is lacking or less intense in Iberians, Greeks, and Slavs.
Likewise, the Iberian component of Sephardics separates them from other Maghrebi-derived groups, and the Slavic component of Ashkenazis separates them from other Iranian-derived groups. Both of these exceptional sources is Southwestern Indo-European, so the specifics of their exceptionality is also similar.
So, they don't have to come from the same source populations to bear a resemblance, or even more of a resemblance than they do to their neighbors. It's just that they're both highly admixed, within a relatively recent time-frame, and whose source populations are semi-related in being southern and western Indo-Europeans. That's it!
Bearing in mind all the numerous cases of obvious local converts, including the major "Mizrahi" group, Iranian Jews, this means there's no mystery to solve! They were all converts in the late 1st millennium AD, and they only differ in the degree to which they admixed with other converts from other genetic populations -- not at all for most cases, but they did for Ashkenazis and Sephardics. Moreover, one half of the sources for each of those admixed groups was semi-related (Greeks or Slavs, and Iberians, both being Southwest Indo-Europeans).
Unlike the very sparse genetic historical record -- meaning, DNA from various eras over time, not trying to decipher history from present-day DNA -- the rich cultural historical record bears this out. No mass migration, no diaspora, no preservation of Hebrew or Aramaic as the native language.
And the true descendants of Second Temple Judaeans largely became Christian, then Muslim, staying put in the Levant, amply confirmed genetically and culturally / historically.
Why the hell would anyone expect a mass migration and diaspora out of Judaea after the Roman Empire fell, and why would they have abandoned their purported native language of Hebrew or Aramaic, when the whole point is that they were an endogamous ethnic enclave that did not just melt into their host societies?
The Roman Empire included all sorts of territory -- and yet none of them are purported to have been sent scattered to the four corners of the globe as a result of the collapse of their imperial overlords.
In fact, the only recorded -- historically and genetically -- mass migrations after the Roman Empire fell were from *outside* of its territory, and outside of their Persian rivals' territory, for that matter. Namely, the Germanic and Slavic migrations in Europe, and the Turkic and Mongol migrations in Central Asia. The subjects of the Roman and Parthian empires more or less stayed put during the Dark Ages, struggling to defend themselves against these nomadic barbarian invasions.
Nobody else from the Levant, Southern Europe, or North Africa is claimed to have been sent on a mass-migrating diaspora journey after Rome collapsed. So the Judaean purported example would be without contemporary counterparts who shared the same purported causal pressure.
And no, just destroying the Second Temple and expelling Jews from the single city of Jerusalem doesn't force them into a diaspora all over the Old World. It means they hole up in the nearby Galilee instead. Sedentary people tend not to want to roam all over the place and leave their homeland behind forever to live in the wild or among strangers.
Crushing a regional revolt doesn't do that either, a la the end of the Roman-Jewish Wars -- Syria seceded during the Crisis of the Third Century (under MENA baddie Queen Zenobia), this revolt was eventually crushed as well, but it didn't send Syrians scattering all over the place.
And even if there were a Judaean diaspora post-Roman collapse, the purported direction / destination is totally backwards! When your imperial overlords and sponsors and patrons collapse, the LAST place you want to go is their home turf, cuz it's becoming more unstable, impoverished, and socially fragmenting by the day.
This is confirmed in the Roman case, where there was tons of "Eastern Mediterranean" DNA from sites in Italy during the imperial heyday of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Once they began disintegrating during the 3rd C, who the hell would want to migrate there? And who the hell would want to remain there, if they were of recent Eastern Med immigrant background? They'd want to bail off of that sinking ship, and return home -- or to some other, more promising empire.
I like empires that didn't get disintegrated...
And so, by the mid-1st millennium and after, there is *comparatively* very little Eastern Med DNA in Italian burial sites (there's still some, cuz again we can't infer history from a snapshot, and Italians have had an Eastern Med DNA component for thousands of years previously).
The only places you would want to journey to after Rome fell, would be the Frankish Empire in NE France, the Byzantine Empire around Constantinople, the Bulgarian Empire nearby in Thrace, the Sasanian Empire (counterpart of the Byzantines, as the Parthians were the counterparts of the Romans), the Abbasid Caliphate in the same place as the Sasanians later on, the Seljuk Empire that replaced the Abbasids for that matter, the Khazar Empire around the Caucasus, the Moorish Empire in the Western Med, and maybe the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt.
What do you know? These are exactly the locations where major Jewish groups suddenly appeared in the post-Classical era.
Forgot to mention the Romaniote Jews -- a group of local converts from the Byzantine Empire, who are Greeks that adopted Talmudic Judaism in the Dark Ages, and speak Byzantine-derived Greek, i.e. after the Byzantine era erased much of the case system from Ancient Greek. (In a typical process of imperiogenesis eroding inflection of its language, to make it easier for the shitloads of L2 learners that now must speak it, as the empire expands out from the founding ethnic group.) They are not Second Temple Jews, whose Greek dialect would've still had a fair amount of inflection in it.
The dum-dum argument about the Ashkenazis having "Roman" DNA is that they poured into Italy during Rome's heyday, and also after its collapse as they fled Judaea. Maybe during the heyday -- everyone else did so as well, it was the place to be. But when it collapsed, they would not have moved onto Germany, since that place was a backwater, not a rising prosperous empire (which was further to the western side of the Rhine, in the nascent Frankish Empire). They definitely did not pour into Italy during / after the 3rd C, when it was disintegrating.
If the story was they picked up some Italian DNA from visiting Rome during its 1st and 2nd C heyday, then fled back home, or to some other rising empire where they are documented to have been, after Rome fell, OK. But that's not the argument, which is instead that the Ashkenazi left Italy for Germany, where they later emerged as Yiddish-speakers, and only after that, a portion of them migrated east into Slavic lands.
Bzzt, wrong direction! There was no rising empire in Germany to attract far-flung strivers looking to make a quick stable buck. The only direction could have been from Italy back to the Eastern Med, either remaining in Greece / Anatolia, or wandering through the Bulgarian Empire (Slavic) or the Khazar Empire (multi-ethnic, not Germanic though), or the Sasanian / Abbasid / Seljuk empire to the further east (even less Germanic). And only from these empires, migrating to the north and west to eventually wind up in Germany -- last.
This "follow the money" argument agrees with Wexler's argument about Yiddish not being an entirely Germanic language originally, let alone one from the Rhineland. But beginning as a Slavic language that was later re-lexified to a Germanic vocabulary and perhaps some morphology, while retaining Slavic syntax and phonology.
There was plenty of money to chase in the Bulgarian Empire, as well as among Slavic subjects of the Khazar Empire -- but comparatively far less among the Germanic groups to the east of the Rhine. If they had joined the Frankish Empire, they wouldn't speak a Germanic language anyway -- the Franks quickly adopted a Romance language, leaving behind their Franconian dialect of German. But the Ashkenazi have never spoken a Romance language as their native tongue, so we can rule out an early stay among the Franks as well.
As I said before, Yiddish has very little inflection compared to other Germanic languages, or languages in general. Even less case inflection than Standard German, which is already somewhat lacking in inflection cuz it became an imperial language with lots of L2 learners, during Germany's imperiogenesis.
So either Yiddish began as a lingua franca in a multi-ethnic context, with lots of L2 learners -- in the Khazar Empire. Or it was adopted very late, after German had already gone through the loss of much of its inflection system, and because the Ashkenazi were L2 learners at the outset, it served as a lingua franca and so lost even more inflection by the time it solidified into Yiddish.
In either case, they did not have a Germanic language as their native language in the 1st millennium, when their ethnogenesis took place.
The earliest recorded use of Yiddish is 1272 -- very damn late into the Dark Ages, well after the other major Jewish conversions. And they were literate! This wasn't their first exposure to literacy, and they're just expressing a language that was previously only spoken for centuries.
We know they're in Germany from those 14th-C burials in Erfurt, albeit still genetically separated. They're culturally unified -- buried in the same cemetery, with no spatial segregation within this Jewish cemetery. But they may have only very recently adopted / constructed Yiddish.
What language did they speak during the cultural unification of the previous several centuries? Either some other language that was re-lexified into a Germanic vocabulary and some morphology, or something else entirely. But presumably a Slavic language, given how much Slavic influence there is in Yiddish.
If that Slavic language came from illiterate Slavs from the Khazar Empire -- and not the literate Slavs from the Bulgarian Empire (and adjoining Slavic cultures near Kiev and Moscow and etc, where Cyrillic spread, or Western Slavs where Roman letters spread), then the lack of a historical literate record is not surprising. It was a spoken lingua franca among a multi-ethnic group that had a lot of illiterate Slavs, and official records were kept in Arabic, Farsi, Turkic, etc., as the main bureaucratic and administrative languages.
The whole logic of (purported) diaspora Jews being an ethnic enclave is that they were endogamous, so did not genetically intermix very much with their hosts, and were culturally apart as well -- different religion, attire / grooming, food taboos, residential living areas, and so on. They are purported to be an ethnic enclave of migrants into the host society.
That is contradicted by the absence of the purported ancestral language, in every single one of these Jewish communities outside of Judaea. When migrants show up and form a semi-enclosed enclave, they maintain their native language! Sometimes it's the *only* language they speak, and even if they also pick up the hosts' language, they retain their native one alongside for awhile -- until they start assimilating. But the Jews never did assimilate, they kept their distinctive religion, clothing, grooming, food taboos, and the rest of their purported cultural heritage.
When Chinese migrants leave China, they form Chinatowns -- and they continue speaking Chinese. Before Italians assimilated into America, they kept speaking Italian languages. So did the Germans, Greeks, and everyone else who wasn't already Anglophone.
Languages are hard to sever over time because there are such huge switching costs to adopting a new native language -- a second language, OK, but not replacing the old native one with a new native one. Very rare, and usually not voluntary, but related to imperial conquest.
So it's damning that no Jewish group is recorded to have spoken Hebrew or Aramaic outside of Judaea, when there's so much inertia behind keeping your language, yes even in a diaspora situation. And if you do give up your native language for that of your hosts, you also give up the other cultural distinctions, in a broad process of assimilation. But we know that Medieval Jews were culturally separate from their Christian or Muslim hosts in all sorts of readily identifiable ways -- not the least being their religion.
Genes and language are correlated, if not perfectly. So isn't it strange that the one cultural component that could most strongly bolster a claim for a Judaean origins of Medieval Jews, is the exact opposite of expectation? They speak the languages of their "hosts" -- because they originated from the exact same culture! They're converts, not migrants.
They are like Euro-descended Americans who speak English while adopting Zen Buddhism, yoga, feng shui, green tea, kimonos, flip-flops, vegetarian diets, and other cultural markers of Buddhist East Asia. These cultural markers are easier to fake for converts, compared to learning a new language -- no white American Buddhists speak fluent Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc. They speak American English! And their community always will!
Language, more so than the relatively easy-to-fake markers, is the main place to look as to a group's history. It's not perfect, but it does shed light.
And in the case of Medieval Jews, and their modern descendants, they are clearly local adopters who altered their religion, clothing, grooming, diet, etc., to fall in line with Talmudic Judaic precepts, while not adopting a Hebrew or Aramaic or other Canaanite language. Just like white American Buddhists.
It's morbidly ironic that the present-day Jewish state is filled with migrants (or their children), NONE OF WHOM can claim a genetic *or* cultural heritage stemming back to ancient Judaea. And that the people they've spent their entire society's history wiping out -- the Palestinians, and at times other Levantines -- are those who have stayed put in that place this whole time!
Genetically, this is settled.
But even culturally, none of the Zionists or their ancestors spoke a Semitic language. The Palestinians and their ancestors did.
The Zionists are not a diaspora which is RETVRN-ing to its ancestral homeland -- anymore than Aztec-descended Catholics who invaded and occupied Rome, or perhaps Toledo, would be RETVRN-ing to their ancestral homeland. Or white American Buddhists who laid waste to Thais in Thailand. It's such a sick obvious joke!
I know, I'm not retarded enough to believe that historical dynamics are shaped mainly by ideas or anything cerebral and nerdy like that. It's material, including social cohesion that is shaped by material militarized invasion near one's physical home turf.
The Jewish state has been propped up by various empires in various states of stagnation and collapse since its inception -- the moribund Ottoman Empire at the outset of settlement, then the British care-takers after the Ottomans bit the dust, then the Americans after the British bit the dust yet only during the late 1970s. America bitchslapped Israel out of the Sinai Peninsula during the Suez phase of the Arab-Iraeli Wars, in 1956, by threatening to annihilate Israel's British imperial overlords economically.
Really the only time Israel had to fight for itself was after 1956 and before 1978, during which it won one war (in '68) and then stalemated in another (in '73), before giving up its autonomous fight and agreeing to vassalage to the American Empire (in '78).
But with America collapsing now, and with new people becoming unified in their struggle against the Zionist invasion -- mainly in Southern Lebanon and Syria -- Israel will have no external sponsor to back it up in reality, and will face ever-mounting forces from their rising-asabiya neighbors, Hezbollah.
These material dynamics are what shape history, not academic debates and evidence about whether or not the Zionists truly have a legitimate claim to that land.
It's just worth emphasizing, for the sake of the truth -- if not for anything that affects the course of history -- how totally upside-down the entire project has been about restoring the Jewish homeland.
Luckily for the true descendants of the Second Temple society, this sick joke is rapidly coming to an end.
The geographic origin of Talmudic Judaism was Iran, not the Levant. The standard Talmud is the Babylonian one, i.e. written near historical Babylon, but administered by Iranian empires ever since the Achaemenids of the mid-1st millennium BC, right up until it was conquered by the Mongols, and then winding up in the Ottomans' possession, a British then American care-taker relationship, etc. Baghdad hasn't been under true local autonomy for 2500 years.
The Palestinian Talmud composed in Jerusalem is *not* the standard one.
So even at the very outset of the Talmudic / Rabbinical era in the mid-1st millennium, before the mass conversions of the last 1st millennium, the source of innovations and standardizations within Judaic religion and culture had decisively left the Levant for Iranian-controlled lands.
If Zionists wanted to RETVRN to Baghdad and restore the glory of original Talmudism, that would be one thing. That's where their particular religion actually comes from, not the Levant. And as it turns out, that's where a lot of their genetic and other cultural heritage comes from -- although more on the Iranian side proper, not Iranian-administered Iraq. Still, closer than their connection, genetic or cultural, to Judaea.
More on Yemeni Jews and the pretzel-twisting nonsense that academics and propagandists talk themselves into, in order to promote the overall grand narrative of a vast Judaean diaspora in the late Roman or post-Roman era...
Autosomal DNA shows that present-day Yemeni Jews are the same as other Yemenis and Arabians, not genetically distinct at all.
Even without this genetic evidence, they don't resemble other Jewish groups culturally, but do resemble their non-Jewish neighbors.
For example, their wedding ceremonies don't have a bridal canopy, they don't walk around anything or anyone ("circumambulation"), and their costumes don't look like any other Jewish group's wedding costumes (highly decorated and elaborate, and really emphasizing the color gold).
Without any blood evidence, I can tell they do not share a common *cultural* ancestor with the Ashkenazis (who are, instead, Indo-European from somewhere near the Caucasus).
Their seder ceremonies are also unique, neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi.
They don't play egg-tapping games or decorate eggs for their springtime renewal holiday (Passover), which is an Indo-Euro thing that Ashkenazis do (and in some very weakened form, Sephardics do outside of Passover, due to their Iberian heritage).
These three have nothing in common within the past 2000 years, culturally or genetically. Three separate groups who adopted Talmudism, while retaining much of their pre-existing local culture (and genepool -- the only innovation there being admixture among Jewish adopters of different sub-populations, but within the same geographic region, e.g. Slavs and Iranians near the Khazar Empire to yield Ashkenazis).
There is also a risible attempt to portray the rulers of the Himyarite Kingdom which controlled much of southern Arabia / Yemen, as converts to Judaism as of circa 400 AD. If true, this would go against my claim that major conversions to Judaism appeared only after the rise of Islam, and where Islam and Christianity cohabited, opening up Judaism as a Third Way / Non-Aligned Movement.
The only concrete conclusions we can draw from Himyarite religion in the late 4th through 5th centuries, is that it became monotheistic, or maybe henotheistic (emphasizing one senior god above other lesser gods within a polytheistic pantheon). And that this was influenced by both Jews and Christians from the Levant -- they came under Byzantine pressure to adopt Christianity, but they wanted to remain politically autonomous, so rejected Christianity.
But they didn't "adopt Judaism" -- what would that even mean in 400 AD? There was no Talmud compiled until a century later, so Talmudic Judaism is out. The Second Temple was long destroyed, so Second Temple Judaism, with its priestly caste that oversaw the sacred ceremonies of its focal religious site, is out as well. This was a limbo period for the descendants of the Second Temple people -- nothing very defined and elaborated for anyone else to adopt.
References to the "Lord of the Jews" or "Lord of Israel" are epithets that non-Jews use as well, like Christians. Did they have material copies of the Torah or the entire Hebrew Bible? Or at least orally transmitted "copies"? Nope. Did they follow kosher dietary laws? Who knows, probably nope. Did they circumcise their babies? IDK, but no reference that they do. Did they celebrate Passover? These are the kinds of things that would identify them as specifically Jewish in religion, not merely "vaguely Jewish-influenced or Jewish-inflected monotheism".
This was a time of all sorts of syncretic religions showing up, typically with some Abrahamic influence, whether Second Temple Judaism, Christianity, or otherwise. Like the popular Manichaeism. So the most accurate term, given the evidence, is not "Judaism" but "Himyarite monotheism" or "Jewish-influenced Himyarite monotheism".
This was a time of all sorts of syncretic religions showing up, typically with some Abrahamic influence, whether Second Temple Judaism, Christianity, or otherwise. Like the popular Manicheanism. So the most accurate term, given the evidence, is not "Judaism" but "Himyarite monotheism" or "Jewish-influenced Himyarite monotheism".
Even then, this does point to the crucial role of Christianity as the state religion of empires, and the desire for polities seeking political autonomy to adopt some Jewish-ish religion as a cultural marker for their political autonomy. It's just that there was no Islam, let alone Muslim empires, to serve as the other pole, with Judaism being a triangulating strategy. Perhaps Old South Arabian polytheism served as this other pole, but I doubt it. I just don't think the Himyarites were Judaic in religion, just monotheistic and influenced in some ways by Judaean religion.
Soon after this Himyarite monotheism, though, it was conquered by the Christian nation / empire of Axum from Ethiopia, which crossed the Red Sea. Then it became Christian, even as it eventually became administered by the Sasanian Persian Empire -- much like the way they tolerated Nestorian Christianity within the core of their empire.
The island of Socotra, to the south of Yemen and to the east of Somalia, was an outpost of Nestorian Christianity as well.
So in the Dark Ages, Yemen had Christian pressures primarily from the expanding state of Axum from Ethiopia, then internally within Yemen, and from a nearby major island. We think of that whole area as nothing but Muslim today, but it was fairly Christian back then. And of course there was a major Muslim presence after the rise of Islam -- it was near ground zero.
So, the perfect place for a group of locals to adopt Talmudic Judaism as a Third Way, which is exactly what happened. Wikipedia's entry on Yemeni Jews has a timeline that is only legendary for ancient times, overblown BS for the early Dark Ages (equating Himyarite monotheism with "converting to Judaism"), and then absent until the early 2nd millennium, when they become part of an international body of Jewish groups, e.g. corresponding with Maimonides.
So that's a good indicator of their date of conversion -- in the late 1st millennium, well after the rise and spread of both Christianity and Islam within their region.
Worth reviewing the extent of Christianity in Iranian-controlled lands during the Dark Ages, since it was huge. It was Nestorian Christianity, or the Church of the East, headquartered near or in Baghdad, and covering much of present-day Iraq and the western half of Iran proper, then extending in pockets off toward the east, covering the western part of Afghanistan, up into southern Central Asia, including Merv, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent.
And notice the outposts in Southwestern Arabia & Socotra, as well as Southern India. Once Muslims showed up in these places, it opened the door to Yemeni Jews and Cochin Jews as a Third Way religion.
Eventually it reached into China during the Tang, Song, and Yuan periods. Along the way some Mongol tribes adopted it, including the Kerait clan, who made up the wives of Genghis Khan's sons, and their sons as well.
But it began very early, in the 5th C, in present-day Iraq -- under Sasanian rule, whose state religion was Zoroastrianism, but which tolerated Nestorian Christianity as a counterweight to their Orthodox Byzantine rivals. They were not necessarily Semitic speakers, it stretched up into Northern Mesopotamia which would've been more Indo-European and Iranian. The common factor is -- at the core of the Sasanian Persian Empire. Hence one of its nicknames being the Persian Church, not the Iraqi or Arabian Church.
As Islam spread throughout these Iranian-controlled lands during the Abbasid and later eras, this opened up Talmudic Judaism as a Third Way between Nestorian Christianity and Islam. And that's exactly where Jews are in Iran and to the east.
However, Christianity was late to arrive in the more eastern lands, and so was Islam. Nestorian Christianity went into decline during the 14th C, and was more or less wiped out by Timur, to be replaced solely by Islam. This dried up the Third Way logic in the eastern parts of the Sasanian Empire and beyond.
And so "Persian Jews" have remained more of a presence in Western Iran, where the Nestorian Church had existed since a far earlier time and up to a later date -- and where Byzantine Christian pressures were not so far away to the west, along with Frankish Crusader pressures in the Levant. These two were not exactly right along the frontier, as the Nestorian nucleus in Mesopotamia and Western Iran was, but still a powerful and looming Christian pressure, unlike the void of Christianity to the east after the rise of the Timurid Empire.
Needless to say this Mesopotamian and Western Iranian region was also home to many Muslims as well -- Persian Jews sprung up, and have remained along a local Christian-Muslim faultline, where Talmudic Judaism offered them a Third Way / Non-Aligned religion.
The next big question is -- does this pattern exist elsewhere or at other times? Not where Christianity and Islam are the two poles, and Judaism as the Third Way. But say, Hinduism and Buddhism as the poles, and some other minority / niche religion being the Third Way.
I don't know enough about niche religions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, or Southeastern India, but those are all places where Buddhism and Hinduism should have opened up a niche for a Third Way.
The Parsis in India, maybe? That would be with Islam and Hinduism as the two poles, in western / northwestern India. They're the only group practicing that religion, though -- not a whole series of converts from across the Muslim-Hindu faultline in South Asia. They arrived with a Third Way religion already, as a fairly well documented diaspora / migration, not local adopters.
The problem with looking for other examples is that perhaps there's something unique about the relationship between Christianity, Islam, and (Talmudic) Judaism, where the niche Third Way is not just any ol' Third Way -- it's one that overlaps decently with each of the two major poles, and in some sense can claim to precede each of them.
That's the ideal Third Way -- it's non-aligned, compatible with both sides, and can demand respect from the two majors, as the elder religion of the trio.
Maybe in other times and places, the Third Ways available are not as ideal -- only similar to one pole, not the other, or maybe not similar to either side. A recent invention rather than preceding them both. Etc.
Hinduism precedes Buddhism, and is related to it, but Hinduism did not spawn another major religion that is territorially close to Buddhist lands, to serve as the other pole, with Hinduism acting as a niche Third Way. Rather, Hinduism is a major pole in its own right, not like Judaism.
Could be something going on in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Americas, I have no clue.
One thing I don't think works, though, is a fusion of the two poles into a Third Way. That's not non-aligned, which is "neither/nor" -- fusion is saying "both/and". Fusion is clearly trying to please both sides disingenuously, while non-aligned is saying I have no dog in the fight, leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, not I'm trying to pledge allegiance to two rival sides at the same time, which is unsustainable.
Judaism really hit the sweet spot in the context of rising Christian and Muslim empires. It's its own coherent religion, not a transparently fence-sitting, both-sides-ing fusion. And yet it's not any ol' non-fusion religion -- it is still similar to each, making it palatable to both without being a deliberate ass-kiss. And it at least partly precedes either side -- so it wasn't recently invented for the purpose of diplomacy, making it more trustworthy. And being older, at least in some sense, it gets respect for being the wise elder.
A looottt of traits had to line up in a single religion for it to see such an explosion of growth in conversions, for a religion that doesn't prosyletize or easily welcome converts. And all doing so independently of each other, at the group level. A very rare event indeed, so that it's the only religion where -- purportedly, but not really -- the majority of its practitioners are in a diaspora, not near where it began.
But that's no great mystery after all -- it's so widespread cuz of adoption, not migration! But to be widely and independently adopted, so many favorable traits had to be working in its favor, within its historically contingent political and cultural environment.
It's miraculous!
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