History of the Jews

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I know the Jews have a big history of being persecuted throughout history. Can someone give me a brief historical timeline on the Jews?

Where they originally a Babylonian tribe and got exiled taking with them the Zoroastrian idea of monotheism?
 
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brief historical timeline!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

We're talking millenia of history.

Well, this page does have multiple timelines.

http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/dinur/Int...esources/timelines_for_ancient_jewish_his.htm

In answer to you specific query, we can't be sure, but it appears more likely imo that they were a merging of people indigenous to the region and some type of invading culture, thus there are times we find holidays that have a meaning that would be more relevant to an agrarian civilization and another meaning that would be more relevant to wandering herders.

Dauer
 
dauer said:
In answer to you specific query, we can't be sure, but it appears more likely imo that they were a merging of people indigenous to the region and some type of invading culture, thus there are times we find holidays that have a meaning that would be more relevant to an agrarian civilization and another meaning that would be more relevant to wandering herders.
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Dauer: It's worth noting that all Kohanim ARE descended from the same person from around 1000 BCE (the person called Y-Chromosomal Aaron). It doesn't confirm much other than that the Jewish people existed as a distinct entity during the time the events of the Book of Exodus supposedly took place.
 
Kari,

I think your statement is giving the genetic evidence a little bit too much credit (we cannot actually say that all kohanim are descended from the same person), although I'm not outright disagreeing with you (we can say that all of those with the Cohen Modal Haplotype might be. There are experts in the field who disagree.) We have to take into account that not all kohanim have the CMH, nor a large majority in most populations (as one study cites "[Geneticist David B Goldstein of Oxford University] finds that 45 percent of Ashkenazi priests and 56 percent of Sephardic priests have the cohen genetic signature, while in Jewish populations in general the frequency is 3 to 5 percent.)" 1. It just occurs with greater frequency among kohanim. And of course, it does occur to some degree in the rest of the Jewish population as well as other populations like the Kurds, Armenians, Italians, and Palestian Arabs.

If anyone is interested in further reading, I always like:

http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html

If you click on the headings, you'll be able to read blurbs from all of the actual studies. W00t.

1:

http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts-cohen-levite.html
 
the traditional view is that the original jews were descended from the family of abraham, a native of ur in mesopotamia (before babylonia technically existed as a nation) who left where he grew up and went with his wife and household to live in what was then canaan. as the descendants and extended family of abraham grew over the next few generations, the numbers grew to hundreds and this was the point at which the sons of jacob went down to egypt. after a few generations in egypt the numbers were in the thousands (the traditional number is 600,000) and it was this many people, along with a "mixed multitude" that left egypt and arrived in the "promised land" of canaan, to be known henceforth as the "land of israel" after the people, the "children of israel", forty years later. there they mixed with canaanites and all sorts until the destruction of the first Temple in 586 BCE, at which time the population was deported to babylon and stayed there for seventy years until we were allowed to return to israel, where the Temple was rebuilt by herod the great. much of the jewish community remained in babylonia at the time and this became the most influential and largest jewish community after the destruction of the Temple by the romans in the 1st century CE. this community produced the "babylonian talmud" and remained hugely influential until the 10th century, lasting more or less to the present day, although most of the iraqi community were simply ethnically cleansed by the nazi-sympathising iraqi regime in the late 40s and early 50s after the establishment of the state of israel. most of it is in israel, quite a lot of it is in london (including myself) of course, there is a lot more to jewish history than this, but that is a brief timeline of our relationship with the land currently known as iraq!

if you want an exhaustive account of the history of the jews up till the destruction of the second Temple, i recommend flavius josephus' "jewish antiquities", which covers everything from the Creation to his own time, the C1st. it is particularly interesting on the (mostly unhappy) relationship between jewish and greek culture, which i know postmaster will find fascinating.

b'shalom

bananabrain
 
i recommend flavius josephus' "jewish antiquities", which covers everything from the Creation to his own time, the C1st.

Got to be careful with Josephus on hard fact, though, because if there's a choice between fact and a jolly good story he'll go for the jolly good story... especially if it makes him look good.
 
hah, you're not wrong about that, although i think it's more true of 'the jewish war': "and then along came josephus, kicked arse and took names, resulting in 500,000 casualties amongst the enemy and a giant bouquet of flowers from his commanding officer, who never mentioned anything about him being a bit of a traitorous bighead." it's less of a problem in the "antiquities", mostly because josephus was not in a position to influence, say, the exodus from egypt. he can generally be trusted with things not involving himself or romans.

b'shalom

bananabrain
 
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