A Coincidental Historical Parallel?

The historical experience of Jews and Protestants shows surprising similarities—not only in their achievements, but in their sufferings too. Both peoples endured centuries of persecution. They were subjected to everything from social discrimination and economic want to imprisonment and death.

Battle for the Bible

The great contributions of the innovators in modern times were made possible by the faithfulness of earlier generations of Bible-believers. The fore-runners of the Protestants were, at first, known as just plain heretics. Their primary contention with the Catholic authorities was whether they could read the Bible. There was no printing press then, and the few hand-copied Bibles in existence were kept in monasteries. For trying to obtain a copy, unnumbered men and women were executed—drowned, beheaded, burned at the stake, etc.

The right to read the Book was the central claim of the Waldensians, the 12th century precursors of Protestantism in Southern France and Northwestern Italy. While Protestant theology, as such, was still a future development, the Waldensians sought to read the Bible, rejected most Catholic sacraments, and opposed the use of images. The Pope sent the Fourth Crusade to root them out. Fifty thousand armed knights were turned loose on the innocent villagers (much easier work than battling Saracens in Palestine). Despite the massacres, the heretics stuck unswervingly to their position. Lollards in 14th century England, Hussites in 15th century Bohemia, and all the sects of the 16th century, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Anabaptists, etc., focussed on translating and circulating copies of the Bible.

In the 12th century, the Pope established the Inquisition to eliminate these heretical Bible-readers. They subsequently endured four centuries of torture and death before they became able to defend themselves. It was only in the 16th century that they acquired the weapons to fight. This was made possible by the evolution of a new type of Protestantism, national churches. The rulers of the state were also the rulers of the church. Such were the Anglicans in Britain and the Lutherans in Germany, as well as the early Calvinivsts. Now that the Protestants were in possession of armed forces, the battles were more evenly balanced.

France endured intermittent civil war for 36 years, beginning in 1562. In 1572 came the infamous Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, when Catholics carried out a prearranged plan to murder Protestants in their homes and in the streets. More than 10,000 died. Meanwhile, the Spaniards dispatched an army to the Netherlands to stamp out Protestantism there. The war, which lasted 80 years, featured such atrocities as the sighing forest, where countless Protestants were hanged from the branches. In 1588 the Spaniards sent a huge fleet, the Spanish Armada, ferrying an army to Britain with the same purpose. More massacres were averted only by the British navy and a terrible storm.

The most devastating conflict was the Thirty Years War in Germany (1618-1648). While various side issues were involved, the central one was a show-down in the centuries-long Catholic effort to stamp out the Protestant heresy. The many small independent states of which Germany was then composed lined up against each other according to their religious faith. It was a battle to the finish, without parallel: when the army of one side would capture a town, the victors would kill every living soul—man, woman, and child. From the north King Gustavus Adolphus led a Swedish army to aid the German Protestants. From the south Duke Wallenstein brought an Austrian army to support the German Catholics. These were among the greatest generals of the day; by the time the war ended, the number of local inhabitants had been sharply reduced. One can find estimates of the dead ranging all the way from one-sixth to two-thirds of the population. Nobody then knew how many, nor do we now. Taking the average of about 40%, and applying it to Germany, Bohemia, and Moravia, the result would be about seven million dead. This would mean that roughly one-fifth of the world population of Protestants was eliminated.(1)

In one sense, however, the result turned out favorably: the war was the last major Catholic effort to eradicate the Protestant heresy by force. The Peace of Westphalia established the geographic boundaries between the two religions in Western Europe approximately as they still are today. To conform the population to the boundaries, large numbers of persons were forced to transfer between Catholic and Protestant states. Both sides concurred in persecuting and expelling the new heretics—those Protestants who were dissatisfied with the national churches. Many of these migrated to Holland or Britain, and thence to the colonies. In Britain they became a strong minority. In the U.S. they became the dominant influence; they even succeeded in writing into the Constitution a clause requiring the separation of church and state.

Having been interrogated under torture, some of the heretics had revealed that they obtained information about the Bible from Jews. Accordingly, the Inquisition was broadened to include them too. Persecution was not new to the Jews, but the nature and intensity of it under the Inquisition were something different. The Jews were expelled from England, France, and Spain; required to wear badges; confined to ghettoes; and barred from most trades and professions. These are only some of the measures promoted by the Church to reduce social contact between Church-members and Jews.

Another such measure was the “blood libel,” stories that were spread implicating Jews for the killing of Christians so as to use their blood in baking. It was also claimed that the Black Plague in the 14th century resulted from poison which Jews put in the wells. Such accusations led to the killing of thousands of Jews. Thousands more were killed in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries by the Crusaders, especially in the Rhineland region, as well as in the Holy Land. In the 17th century, the military victories of the Protestants brought them relief from persecution, but the Jews did not share in this. For them, persecution has been going on right into our own times. The Ukrainians massacred hundreds of thousands from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Tens of thousands perished in the Russian pogroms of the 19th and 20th centuries. And in this century, the Nazi Germans methodically wiped out millions. Under Hitler’s leadership during World War II, most of the Jews of Europe were exterminated—man, woman, and child. Estimates of the dead range somewhere between 5 and 6 million, constituting about one-third of the pre-war Jewish population of the world.

The public is naturally more aware of the modern persecution of the Jews than of that of the Protestants a few centuries ago. Who suffered the most? Both peoples were massacred by Crusaders. The populations of each were expelled from several countries. Both were accused of baking bread with the blood of Catholic children, and were executed for it. For each of them suffering reached a nightmarish culmination in central Europe. Of course, the incidence varied. The Crusaders killed a higher proportion of heretics (Protestants) than of Jews. And the Inquisition too was harder on them; as a rule, heretics were barbarously executed, while Jews only suffered discrimination. A possible exception was the application of the Inquisition in Spain, where the order for the expulsion of Jews in 1492 offered them the option of conversion to Christianity. Large numbers of them, led by the Chief Rabbi, took this option, which was, unfortunately, out of the frying pan and into the fire. Becoming Christians subjected them to the Church laws on Christian heresy, which were far more severe than Church laws for Jews. It did not take the authorities long to become suspicious that many of the converts were secretly continuing to observe Jewish religious laws and customs. And, with the aid of tortures for which the Inquisition was justly famous, many confessions were extracted. Thus, tens of thousands of the victims in Spain were of Jewish extraction. But this was an exception. In other countries the Inquisition focussed primarily on non-Jewish heretics.

In the central European experience, on the other hand, a higher proportion of the world population of Jews may have been massacred than that of Protestants: over 30% of the former in the Holocaust, compared to about 20% of the latter in the Thirty Years War.

First Fruits

In both cases, those terrible experiences were followed by historic improvements in their situ- ations. In science and technology, the Protestants have become the most successful nations, while the Jews are the most successful individuals. As they gained political independence, the Protestants developed the most rapid rate of economic and technical progress in history. Over the centuries since then, they have made remarkable advances in the struggle against pestilence, famine, and “conquerors without mercy”—the three threats to survival described in Deuteronomy 28. Thus:

• The last plague to hit Europe on a large scale was the Black Death of 1348-49, more than a century before the Reformation. It killed about a third of the population. Since then, there have been many other challenges, most recently AIDS, but, thus far, the medical profession has succeeded in preventing each new outbreak of disease from reaching disaster proportions.
• Individuals have died of starvation, but there have been no really wide-spread famines in these countries in three centuries. The largest exception was the potato blight of 1845-47 in Western Europe. Between about 1700 and 1850, the British revolutionized farming methods and machinery. Since then, the Americans have brought further progress, including new methods of preservation. The nations of this group now produce the largest surpluses of food for export in the world.
• Having established their indepence through the wars of religion, the Protestant nations rose rapidly from relative obscurity to world leadership. Two of them in succession, first Britain, then the U.S., emerged as the greatest military powers on Earth. In this century, the rivalry between them and the third Protestant power, Germany, led to the first world wars in history. Since then, the U.S. has developed an astounding array of new weapons, guided by radars and computers. Thus, superior technology has helped them to defeat would-be conquerors who know not mercy.

In the 19th century, the political emancipation of the Jews made it possible for them to join in the development of science and technology. Along with the Protestants, they have played a key role in the struggle against plague, famine, and conquest. They have also contributed to the kind of emergency defenses against cosmic accidents described in earlier articles. Thanks to them, we are safer now than ever before.

In the same period, the Jewish settlements in Palestine started to grow, aided especially by Protestant fundamentalists in Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere. Shortly after World War II, the Jews succeeded in gaining control of the land of Israel. For the first time in two millenia, they began to experience life as a nation. In the few decades since then, they have avoided plagues and famines. And their military record against would-be conquerors has at times seemed miraculous. Consider, for example, the “War of Independence” in 1948. When the British forces left Palestine, the Jews numbered less than a million, living amidst a larger, hostile Arab population. Short of weapons, they nevertheless succeeded in repelling well-armed invading forces from six Arab nations whose combined populations numbered over thirty million.

Why the Parallel?

Nowadays success is making the Protestants more popular. Persons from every continent are converting to this belief, and many of them are seeking to migrate into Protestant countries. Similarly various groups from Third World countries are anxious to prove some degree of Jewish ancestry and thus to justify migration to little Israel. The relative success of these countries in modern times makes it easy to fathom the motivations, conscious or unconscious, of the new converts and would-be immigrants. Back in the Middle Ages; however, there were no success stories to strengthen the hopes of the heretics. Nor had the new state of Israel invigorated Jewish morale. For centuries, the normal consequences of faithfulness was physical pain, not material gain. For both peoples, the only grounds for hope were the ancient prophecies of the Bible.

Why should it have been them in particular? Is it just a matter of chance that these two groups clung to the Bible, even when it could mean death to do so? Is it just an accident of history that other peoples turned away from the Book, even when it was available to them? Or is there some identifiable cause for the difference between the groups which clung to the Bible, Protestants and Jews, and those peoples who were not so inclined? Does the Bible have some special appeal for a particular type of culture? Were the two peoples especially suited to it by some shared feature in their character or background? Is it a question of psychological wave-length?

Kinship would be the most obvious explanation of the parallel. If the Jews are at home with the Bible, might not their relatives feel the same way? Could supposed Gentile Bible-believers have Israelite ancestors too?

Assimilated Jews? Lost Tribes?

In recent years, about half the marriages of American Jews have been with non-Jewish spouses. Such intermarriage, usually at lesser rates, has been going on in many countries for thousands of years. By now their descendants must be far more numerous than the Jews themselves. There is at least one way to get a rough idea how big the number might be. Since the days of the Roman Empire, the world population of Jews has not quite doubled, from over 8 million then to less than 15 million today.(2) In the same two thousand years, the Gentiles have increased roughly 30 times, from about 170 million then to more than 5 billion now.(3) In other words, over the last two thousand years, Gentiles appear to have been increasing fifteen times faster than Jews!

Is there any reason to believe that Jews, including the assimilated ones and their des- cendants, have been multiplying significantly less than other peoples? Are there any special disadvantages, economic, political, biological, or other, which would have slowed them down that much. Economically, this does not seem likely. Science is not the only field in which the Jews have been phenomenally successful—business is another. The Chosen People have not been materially handicapped in comparison with others. They could afford to raise children at least as well as their Gentile neighbors. Their health is not known to have fallen to levels lower than that of Gentiles. Indeed, their religious hygiene has been credited with giving them a relatively high survival rate during the Black Plague in Europe in the middle of the 14th century.

True, they have been subject to intermittent persecution. However, this could hardly have made so great a difference. The Nazi Holocaust of one-third of the world’s Jews is a record in the 20th century. But the proportion of Germans killed in the Thirty Years War during the 17th century may have been as high. The Roman blood-baths are reported to have killed in the neighborhood of one-tenth of world Jewry. But that is not an exceptional figure; in this century alone higher percentages were lost of Armenians and Cambodians. As for the Ukrainian massacres from the 17th to the 20th centuries, these were on a lesser scale. Losses on other occasions, such as the Crudades and the Spanish Inquisition, were all proportionately small. Most peoples of the world have now and then suffered as much in war, civil or international.

In sum, it seems quite improbable that the rates of multiplication of the descendants of Jews were so very much less than those of other peoples. It is unlikely to have been even as low as half of the Gentile rate, let alone one-fifteenth of it. Rather than reducing the birth rate, the main effect of persecution has probably been, simply, to increase assimilation. Counting Jews and their assimilated descendants together, the rate of growth has probably been close to that of the Gentiles. If it was the same, the data mentioned above would give a combined total today of approximately 250 million (8 million x 30, rounded). Even if it was as low as half the Gentile rate, the total would still approach 125 million.

And that would still not be all of the descendants of Israel. In the 1st millenium before the common era, when the nation was split into northern and southern kingdoms, the latter, Judah, became ancestral to the Jews. A large part of the northern kingdom was exiled to Assyria, out of which came the “Lost Tribes.” Originally, the northern kingdom had been more populous than the southern. But some of its citizens may have escaped exile, staying behind to join the Jews. Many others of the deportees are known to have retained their Israelite identity and eventually came to be counted as Jews. Taken together, these factors could justify a crude assumption that the number of members of the Lost Tribes was not very different from that of the Jews.

Their rate of multiplication could also have been similar, since it was affected by the same factors. Thus, another 125 to 250 million descendants of the Lost Tribes can be added to the 125 to 250 million Jews and assimilated Jews. The combined total of the descendants of Israel today would then be between 250 and 500 million. Of these, only the 15 million Jews are identified as such. All the rest are assimilated. What we see is only the tip of the iceberg. The estimate is crude, but a rough calculation is all that is practical in our present state of ignorance. Refined estimates should be possible in the future.

Future estimates can be increased by the estimated numbers of assimilated descendants of the pre-Roman generation of Jews. (The figures above include only descendants of people who were Jews at the time of the Roman Empire.) Conversely, the estimates may be reduced so as to reflect the fact that most of the individuals concerned are not of strictly Israelite stock. The numbers only indicate the Israelite genetic share in the world population. Some cultures may reflect more Israelite influence; others less. Some individuals may have a larger proportion of Israelite ancestry; others less. In many of them the proportion of Israelite ancestry may be too small to have much effect on character.

The same is true of Jews, after all. Some Jews are more Jewish than others. There has been a lot of intermarriage with Gentiles. Walk the streets of Jerusalem: you can see that Lithuanian Jews look a bit like Lithuanian Gentiles, and that Jews from Morocco are rather like other Moroccans. Ethiopian Jews remind us of Ethiopians, while Jews from India somewhat resemble Indians. In this way, members of the various communities can usually be distinguished on sight. The differences between the descendants of assimilated Jews could be just as large, perhaps even larger. They can be expected to look somewhat like the Gentiles among whom they have been living.

Whatever adjustments are made for factors such as those described above, they are unlikely to be large enough to alter the conclusion: the assimilated descendants of Israel are numerous enough to account for the Protestant phenomenon. Their traditions, however diluted, could be the reason for the parallels with Jewish experience. This could explain not only the readiness to suffer for the religion of the Bible, but also the inventiveness.

To say that they were numerous enough to have produced these parallels does not prove that they actually did so. Were they in the right place at the right time? Such questions are difficult to answer, because it is difficult to trace all the individual geneologies, especially if the assimilation occurred many generations ago. The process often involved individuals intermarrying with Gentiles, one at a time. And there are too many individuals to trace over too many generations. Nevertheless, there have been some cases of assimilation in large numbers. Mass conversions of Jews under threat of death or expulsion occurred in Spain, Iran, and Afghanistan, for example. The assimilation of the Lost Tribes is older, but is also likely to have been in large groups. Because of their size, these groups are easier to trace. They in turn are likely to have offered the most congenial environment for assimilating individual Jews. Historically, assimilation has not occurred uniformly over the inhabited areas of the globe. It tends to be concentrated in certain cultures. And the des- cendants of mixed marriages ordinarily seek to live among people who are most congenial—in the literal sense of the word. Locating the Lost Tribes should thus help us to find a substantial proportion of the descendants of Jews who assimilated individually.

Methods of Investigation

According to the definition followed here, the Lost Tribes do not know their own identity as descendants of Israel. If they did, they would not be “lost.” They are not recognizable Jews wandering around in Antarctica or the upper Amazon. They are supposed Gentiles, living today amongst the peoples of the known world. Indeed, we have probably seen or heard them on television, radio, and news magazines—some of us may even have stared at them in the mirror! The difficulty is that we have done so without recognizing them as such. Neither they themselves, nor others, know who they are. The process of assimilation occurred so long ago—hundreds or even thousands of years in the past.

For centuries, their identity has been sought by Rabbis, religious students, learned travellers, and others. Nowadays, archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists are helping through their work in identifying the roots of the various ethnic groups which compose the different nations. These investigations are likely to be rounded out soon from another field of research—genetics. In recent years, the findings of this new science have come to be accepted in courts of law, in paternity suits, for example, and in identifying criminals. Analysis of the genetic types of whole communities is still in the early stages. At Tel Aviv University in Israel, genetic patterns of Jewish communities from different parts of the world are being compared. Differences between them may have arisen from spontaneous trends within each community (sometimes called “drift”). They also result from intermarriage with inhabitants of the various localities where the Jews are living. Thus most of the modern descendants are likely to diverge significantly from the “type” of the patriarchs.

Some day it may be possible to analyze the amount and direction of drift, as well as the degree and type of foreign elements which have been incorporated into each community of Jews and Lost Tribes. Prospects are looking up for tracing divergences back through time. Techniques for the analysis of ancient DNA are progressing rapidly. DNA has been cloned from an Egyptian mummy 2400 years old; and the same has been done for animals and plants that are much older.(4) By such means, we should soon be able to confirm and refine the finding from history and archaeology. We are going to know more about our ancestry than has ever been possible before. The pace may be quick or slow, depending, in part, on the amount of resources devoted to research. But one way or another, it is likely to be only a few years before the descendants of the Lost Tribes, as well as of the assimilated Jews, emerge into visibility.

Assyrian Records

Up to now, the most useful work has been historical and archaeological. In many countries, most of the peoples that have landed and settled there from prehistoric times to the present are known; their characteristics have been described and areas of demographic concentration are pinpointed. Of special relevance to the identification of the Lost Tribes is the excavaton of the remains of the Assyrian Empire in northern Iraq and surrounding regions. Archaeologists and historians are recovering data unknown during the millennia since the exile of the Israelites there. Professional digging in the area began toward the middle of the 19th century. Buried in the sands that covered Nineveh were found monumental inscriptions, royal correspondence, and other records of the Empire. Early in this century, large collections of Assyrian texts began to appear. From them, historians have been gradually piecing together the Assyrian experience.

Late in the 8th century, an overlap occurs between these records and the Biblical account. This is the moment of the exile. An inscription of King Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727 BCE) concerning the conquest of northern Israel reads, in part:

...all its inhabitants [and] their possessions I led to Assyria. They over threw their king Pekah and I placed Hoshea as king over them.(5)

This account can be compared with the Biblical narrative, recorded in II Kings 15:29-30:

In the days of Pekah, king of Israel, came Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria, and took Ijon and Abel- beth-maachah and Janoah and Kedesh and Hazor and Gilead and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali, and carried them captive to Assyria.

And Hoshea, the son of Elah, made a conspiracy against Pekah, the son of Remaliah, and smote him and slew him and reigned in his stead.

The Israelite account is more detailed, but on every point of overlap, the Assyrian record agrees. Specifically, the two sources are in accord on the name of the Assyrian emporer (Tiglath-Pileser), the consequence of the conquest (deportation), the names of the two successive rulers of the northern kingdom of Israel (Hoshea and Pekah), and the method of succession (revolt). There can be little doubt that we are here reading about the same event seen through different eyes. Before that point of overlap, most of what we know about the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom comes from the Bible. For the following century, however, most of the material comes from Assyria.

We now have hundreds of citations about the working of their system of deportation.(6) We know which peoples were deported, and where they were taken. We also have some details of what happened to them. From these and other sources, we can now, at last, pick up the trail of the exiled Israelites. Most valuable is the light which the Assyrian records shed on certain hitherto obscure passages in the Bible. It turns out that these passages contain clues of decisive importance on the location of the deportees. Thus, it is only now that the Lost Tribes can be identified with scientific accuracy. Like the return of the Jews to Israel, this momentous event is yet another sign that we have, indeed, entered the Last Times.

Details are to follow in future articles.

John Hulley

Copyright © 1994 by John Hulley.

Editor's Note: John Hulley has published a book, expanding upon the ideas laid out in this article. His book, Comets, Jews & Christians, is well researched, concisely written, and very understandable. It should appeal to both professional and layman alike.

(1) Population estimates are based on Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History, G.B., 1978.[back]

(2)“Population,” Encyclopedia Judaica. [back]

(3)See, e.g., “Ancient DNA,” Science, September 20, 1991, pp. 1354-6. [back]

(4) According to McEvedy and Jones, supra.[back]

(5) Cited in J.B. Pritchard (ed.), The Ancient Near East, Princeton, 1958, vol. 1, pp. 193-4.[back]

(6) See, e.g., Bustenay Obed, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Wiesbaden, 1979. [back]