@clacke khazar hypothesis has been around since like the 1800s. there is also christian identity movement from I think the 60s that thinks white people are the original jews
@clacke they believe jews are still and always jews, they just believe that all mormons have a spiritual hebrew tribe. you get a special blessing where the patriarch of your church tells you which tribe you have. Most are Manasseh but occasionally someone gets a different tribe. An interesting fact about this is that Jews descended from temple tribes like Levi have a theoretical claim to participation in Mormon temples.
@Leyonhjelm Everyone has a bit of everything, it's been a somewhat global world for over two millennia.
But when people claim that an ethnicity is basically made up and has no historical continuity, the people making the claim have a lot to prove when it's an unusually coherent community that has been kept together by themselves and by outside persecuters, and when there's physical evidence like the "Cohen" gene.
The only two motivations I can see behind a claim like that are antisemitism and motivated ignorance, which is just antisemitism with extra steps.
I didn’t know you had to be an anti semite to doubt such historical claims. Or at least to doubt they’re any more Hebrew than the ones who did not reject Christ and became Christians. After several thousand years, it’s hard to imagine there isn’t a few drops of Jacob’s blood in most of Europe’s population
I’m not that invested in the topic, I just think jumping to assumptions is lazy. Whether assumptions of motivation or assumptions of historic validity.
@Leyonhjelm That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about yet another pattern and aspect of a centuries-long harassment campaign against a people for no reason other than to create an enemy to rally people against.
But I guess we're not going to agree on this being morally abhorrent and worth pointing out when we see it.