Modern Identity Creates Ancient Origins

In Initial Comments: Saviors and Survivors I point out:

The politics of Darfur has another interesting Jewish aspect.

In his discussion of the history of Sudan, Professor Mamdani alludes to the underlying benefit of Arabization to the native Sudanese merchants of Funj but never seems to state it explicitly. As far as I can tell Arabization allowed the developing capitalist class to plug into Arab trade networks and apply the traditional Arabic-Islamic commercial code that made long distance trade possible. The Judaization of the Khazars probably took place for more or less the same reasons as I discuss in The Origins of Modern Jewry. In the cases of both Funj and also E. European ethnic Ashkenazim, migrant origins have been assumed or postulated for reasons that often relate to Zionist politics. In her most recent research Columbia Professor Nadia Abu el-Haj has addressed some of the genetic anthropological issues that appear in the comments section of the Origins article.

The process by which a mixed group of Turko-Slav, Slavo-Turkic, Armenoid, Balkan, Germanic, and Celtic populations of Eastern Europe and Southern Russia came to view themselves as originating in historic Palestine without a shred of evidence and with all available data indicating local autochthonous origins is not unique to ethnic Ashkenazim and is in fact one of the building blocks of the modern world.

Just as Sudanese history and politics is obscured by modern myths of Arab invasion, rejecting the facts of Yiddish origins makes it impossible to understand either the development of modern Jewry or the transition from the ancient to the Medieval Christian and Islamic worlds.

The effort of Jewish racists to enforce a false view of Jewish ancestry is also comparable to the German Nazi attempt to create a hegemonic discourse on German or Aryan origins. We can better understand the German Nazi mentality by studying the modern Jewish politics of Jewish origins.

The facts of the formation of Yiddish ethnicity are helpful in the struggle against the Israel Lobby because they facilitate the correct characterization of Zionist colonizers in Palestine as a despicable conglomeration of racist murderous genocidal invaders, interlopers, and thieves.

Yet it is even more important to acknowledge the impossibility of good and honest historiography without an accurate description of origins and myths of origins.
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