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 prior to 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 Greeks 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. And 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 prior to 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 had 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
claimedthat 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. And 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.
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