Jews, Nazis and the myths of antiquity

Genetics and history reveal the Nazi fantasy, revealing that Jews are never alien to Europe, but that it is one of the deepest ties with ancient times, Michael Cohen.

For centuries, Europe defined itself by drawing the limits of belonging. Sometimes the Jews were placed outside these lines, they said they were foreign to the continent. Zionism has emerged in part of this border construction, and imagined Jewish life elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the deeper story shown by history and genetics is not exile from Europe, but the circulation within it. Jewish communities were not separate from the European ecosystem; They were one of the dynamic currents.

The Nazis built their ideologies in marble myths. They dreamed of Sparta’s discipline, Athens’ brightness and heirs of Rome’s power. The rallies reiterated the forms of Parthenon and Colosseum, as if ancient architecture could be reshaped by racial fantasies. But in classical times, the ancestors of modern Germans were the forest tribes on the sides of the empire, and the forest tribes were more known than the raids and more than philosophy. They were not the core of ancient times.

The ironic is that the community, which the Nazis condemned as alien, is more closely related to genetic and cultural terms, the classical Mediterranean and the Nazis itself. Behar et al. Latest genetic studies including (2010) Nature– Oster (2012) and Atzmon et al. (2010), Ashkenazi Jews Go down from a mixture of the Jewish lineage and the Southern European lineage, especially Italian and Greek. Father’s lineage Levantine, mother lineage southern Europe lean.

Today, at least 50 percent of the Jews of Ashkenazi – partly Greek, but mostly Italian – in many independent studies, the rest is probably followed to Levant and other parts of Europe. The result is a people, not except that, based on the transitions of the historical Roman world.

As these Greco-Roman Jewish communities moved to Rheinland and East to Poland and Russia to the north, they carried out literacy, discussion and urban intellectual life habits. Tradition Talmudic The study emerged from these circumstances from these conditions to look at intense texts, to object to meanings, to refine arguments. It reflects a culture that is buried in learning networks, not a person other than their environment.

Continuities appear not only in the soul, but of physical similarity. Many Ashkenazi shares the feature with Italians and Greeks; I know this personally, usually mixed with both. Genetic studies confirm what can be seen in the eye: Ashkenazim set is closer to southern Europeans than the north. These are not separation markers, but markers of shared pasts and overlapping celebrations.

Irony is sharp. The Nazis claimed that they embodied Athens and Rome, but in Germany, they were the community they tried to erase that world. As they destroyed them, they cut Germany from one of their living connections to ancient times.

The larger lesson is that nations are never pure. These are mixtures, transitions, re -inventions. Rome was never just “Italian ,, Athens never only“ Greek ”. Thinking of Jews outside Europe is to misunderstand Europe itself. They were part of the texture – a Mediterranean and continental people shaped by the same flows and transformations that shape everyone.

The hardest irony is that the closest connections with Athens and Rome did not lie to those who worship them from afar, but those who touched their world through family, migration and belief. Genetic science underlines this circulation. And perhaps more radical recognition is that Jewish history is never elsewhere. It has always been a part of Europe’s own story – not as a stranger, but as one of the many yarns that make the fabric.

And if it was said otherwise for centuries, Zionism was built; Less than legend in science or history. It is another irony that it relieves so deeply from the root: the evidence is a policy of exile, even if the exile is never as absolute as the legend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L7b16dycyy

Michael Cohen is a Jewish Australian writer based on Sydney, who has previously contributed comprehensively to international newspapers and offers both articles and conceptual materials. Now it focuses on human rights problems.

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