"Brit-Am Now"-193
February 13, 2002
Contents:
1. Books Arrived
2. Finns of Finland
3. Ezekiel in the Light of Isaiah
4. Quotation
5. Genghis Khan and descendants
6. Why That Texas Town is Named "Palestine"
1. Books Arrived
Subject: About My Order Mr. Davidy!
Shalom from the bayou in South Louisiana Mr. Davidy:
Just wanted to email you to let you know that the books "Origin" and
Biblical Truth" made it to my home today via the US Mail. Todah for these
fine additions to my library and already I can't get my head out of Origin.
Great Work Mr. Davidy. I am sure I will have more questions for you later,
but now, back to studying! Again my friend, thank you so much, and please
keep me informed of any other books you may have in the near future.
Am Yisroel Chai
Tom (Toma) Morris
2. Finns of Finland
From: Lari Kemilainen
Subject: Some info on Finns
Dear Yair,
Greetings from sunny and snowy finnish winter! I just ran to a website
dealing with ancient finnish history that wasn't taught to us in school.
The general view here is that we are descendants of tribes that wandered
here from Uralic mountains and we had no remarkable civilization before the
swedes conquered us in the Middle Ages, but it seems like that is not the
only option available... Author of this site mentions numerous sources that
picture Finland as a remarkable kingdom during Viking Era. Finnish
inhabitation is also told to have come from Middle East, not Ural, which
makes sense, if the humankind has generally spread around the world from
that direction.
Our first king was, according to mythology, called "Kaleva", which
resembles very much the name Caleb.
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/christy/32/etu.html
With kindest regards,
Lari Jeremias Kemiläinen
Finland
3. Ezekiel in the Light of Isaiah
From: "Rusty"
Subject: Yair Ezekiel 38 was very good brings to mind Isa 64
Maybe one day we will look at your writings and you will be remembered in
likes of Rashi and Maimonides and many of the great biblical commentators.
I think as you say their will be a great flushing out of Israelites from
our present locations be it war and other calamities. Many who are with us
now like the Sabeans and Asians and others will join ranks. I pray the Lord
will change their heart like an Israelite one. Also Isaiah 64 has clues
that the calamities will flush the wicked and leave the righteous remnant
of Israel. Isaiah 64:1-3 We might say people have had a chance to come to
our lands live at peace and enjoy prosperity and security because we never
lose, by this means they have seen God at work this also includes the
Israelites. 64:4-6 We have enjoyed the best God had to offer but many of us
sin and our society is becoming like Israel before Assyrian exile and soon
we will be left helpless by Hashem to the calamities that will come and
flush us out.Isa 64:7 after these calamities the righteous remnant will be
lead back somehow to Israel maybe lead by Messiah ben Joseph. Then Isa 64;7
"We are clay and You are our Potter and we are all Your handiwork." We will
then be righteous enough to have our Davdic Messiah and Hashem will battle
for us once again and Hashem will defeat the hoards and reveal his majesty
to the world as He did in Egypt. I pray that I will join that ultimate
battle over darkness and live to see justice and freedom prevail. I don't
think Hashem gave me auburn hair and red eyes for nothing.
4. Quotation
From: Verba Volant <quotation@verba-volant.net>
Author - Blaise Pascal
French - le bonheur est une chose merveilleuse: plus tu en donnes plus il
t'en reste
English - happiness is a marvellous thing: the more you give, the more you
are left with
5. Genghis Khan and descendants
NYTimes.com Article: A Prolific Genghis Khan, It Seems, Helped People the
World
A Prolific Genghis Khan, It Seems, Helped People the World
February 11, 2003
By NICHOLAS WADE
A remarkable living legacy of the Mongol empire has been
discovered by geneticists in a survey of human populations
from the Caucasus to China.
They find that as many as 8 percent of the men dwelling in
the confines of the former Mongol empire bear Y chromosomes
that seem characteristic of the Mongol ruling house.
If so, some 16 million men, or half a percent of the
world's male population, can probably claim descent from
Genghis Khan.
The finding seems to be the first proof, on a genetic
level, of the occurrence in humans of sexual selection, a
form of sex-based natural selection in which a male or
female has an unusual number of offspring. This process can
greatly influence the genetic makeup of a species,
resulting in otherwise puzzling features like the peacock's
cumbersome tail.
The survey was conducted by Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith of Oxford
University and geneticist colleagues in China, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan and Mongolia. Over 10 years they collected blood
from 16 populations that live in and around the former
Mongol empire.
In the late 13th century the sons of Genghis Khan
controlled territory that stretched from the Pacific coast
of China to the Caspian Sea, spanning land now held by the
Central Asian republics and the northeast corner of Iran.
Dr. Tyler-Smith's team analyzed the DNA of the Y
chromosome, a part of the genome that is useful for
establishing human lineages because, like a surname, it is
passed down from father to son.
They found that a cluster of Y chromosomes carried a
genetic signature showing they were closely related to one
another and to a single founder chromosome in the recent
past. These signature chromosomes were far more common than
would be expected by chance among most of the populations
living within the former Mongol empire. But none of the
peoples outside the empire carried the chromosomes, except
for the Hazara people of Pakistan and Afghanistan, former
Mongol soldiers who claim descent from Genghis Khan.
Dr. Tyler-Smith said the signature chromosomes probably
belonged to members of the Mongol ruling house.
Genghis Khan's sons and heirs ruled over the various
khanates in his empire, and may well have used their
position to establish large harems, especially if they
followed their father's example. David Morgan, a historian
of Mongol history at the University of Wisconsin, said
Genghis's eldest son, Tushi, had 40 sons.
As for Genghis himself, Dr. Morgan cited a passage from
`Ata-Malik Juvaini, a Persian historian who wrote a long
treatise on the Mongols in 1260.
Juvaini said: "Of the issue of the race and lineage of
Chingiz Khan, there are now living in the comfort of wealth
and affluence more than 20,000. More than this I will not
say . . . lest the readers of this history should accuse
the writer of exaggeration and hyperbole and ask how from
the loins of one man there could spring in so short a time
so great a progeny."
Dr. Morgan said that since Mongol rulers controlled a large
area, it was "perfectly plausible" that they should have
fathered many children. "It's pretty clear what they were
doing when they were not fighting," he said.
The Mongol rulers' apparent assiduity in propagating their
genes has surprised even human behavioral ecologists,
researchers who seek to explain many aspects of human
society in terms of the pursuit of reproductive advantage.
"I think it's astonishing," said Dr. Robin Dunbar of the
University of Liverpool, co-author of a leading textbook of
human behavioral ecology. "This is a staggering example of
how a very small lineage can have a hugely disproportionate
share of the descendant population."
Dr. Dunbar said it was known that in tribes like the
Yanomamo of Brazil, men of high status tended to have more
children. But the Mongol study was the first to his
knowledge to document this on a genetic level. "It's
exactly equivalent to elephant seals slogging it out on the
beach - a handful of males get all the matings," he said.
Dr. Tyler-Smith and his colleagues estimate that the common
ancestor of the signature chromosomes they found in the
Mongol empire populations lived in around A.D. 1000, 162
years before the birth of Genghis Khan. Dr. Morgan said, "I
see no reason why the family shouldn't have descended in a
straight line" from that time to Genghis Khan.
The geneticists' evidence for linking the cluster of
signature chromosomes to Genghis Khan is necessarily
indirect. The Mongol ruler was buried secretly and his tomb
has not been found, let alone any bodily remains that might
still harbor fragments of DNA. But the signature
chromosomes are carried by only a fifth of present-day
Mongolian men, suggesting they belonged to an elite group,
presumably the lineage of Genghis Khan and his sons.
Dr. Tyler-Smith and his colleagues argue they have found a
second link to Genghis Khan, through the Hazaras, whose
oral tradition holds that some of them are his direct
descendants. The fact that the Hazaras carry the signature
chromosome confirms their oral tradition of descent from
Genghis and suggests he carried the chromosome too, the
geneticists say.
But historians find fault with this argument. Dr. Morris
Rossabi, a Mongol expert at Columbia University, described
the Hazaras' claim to be direct descendants of Genghis Khan
as "untenable."
"They are descendants of troops and guards sent by Chinggis
to this region, and I would be very suspicious about a
genealogy based on their so-called oral traditions," Dr.
Rossabi wrote in an e-mail message. (Chinggis is a more
correct spelling of the familiar Genghis.)
The name Hazara, from the Persian word for "thousand,"
suggests a Mongol military formation and the Hazaras do
look Mongol, Dr. Morgan said, although unlike some
villagers in Afghanistan who still speak archaic Mongol,
the Hazaras themselves speak Dari, a form of Persian. Some
Hazaras may have been Mongol soldiers but none of the
imperial house ruled in Afghanistan, Dr. Morgan said,
making it hard to argue that the Hazaras' signature
chromosome comes directly from Genghis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/11/science/11KHAN.html?ex=1046104434&ei=1&en=cb1af8c6d8d24795
6. Why That Texas Town is Named "Palestine"
From: Moonhorse2@aol.com
(Dr. Medoff is Visiting Scholar in the Jewish Studies Program at the State
University of New York-Purchase College; his books include the Historical
Dictionary of Zionism, coauthored with Prof. Chaim I. Waxman.)
Why That Texas Town is Named 'Palestine'
by Dr. Rafael Medoff
The fact that the space shuttle Columbia broke apart in the vicinity of a
Texas town named Palestine has been the subject of much conversation in
the Middle East.
In Cairo, the New York Times reports, the average cafe denizen noted the
presence of an Israeli astronaut on board as well as the reports that it
apparently began crumbling over Palestine, Texas, and concluded that Allah
was punishing America for supporting Israel.
In the gulf kingdom known as the United Arab Emirates, a newspaper columnist
expressed his hope that perhaps the sight of the Columbia shuttle's crashing
in the town of Palestine, Texas reminds the Israeli people of the daily
tragedy of the Palestinians.
And on the Islamic website oealfjr.com, one Sheikh Dr. Ali Al-Tamimi
remarked that when CNN announced at the beginning that the shuttle fell
near the city of Palestine, Texas, I said to myself: Allah is great; thus,
Allah willing, will America fall in Palestine.
Whether the shuttle exploded precisely over the town of Palestine, or
merely in its vicinity, is not clear.
Be that as it may, the tragic spotlight now shining upon Palestine, Texas,
naturally leaves some Americans curious as to why it has such as unusual name.
The answer is that it's not an unusual name at all.
In Texas, there are also towns named Hebron, Goshen, Bethlehem, and Jonah.
There is a Sinai in South Dakota, a Jerusalem in Arkansas, an Ephraim in
Colorado, a Naomi in Georgia, a Jericho in Vermont, a Nazareth in
Pennsylvania, and a Zion in Maryland.
Every state in the union, except Hawaii, has one or more towns named after
biblical sites or individuals.
Altogether, there are more than 1,000 biblically-named towns from coast to
coast.
That's not because residents of those regions have some special sympathy
for the Palestinian Arabs.
Towns like Palestine were established by 19th-century religious Christian
settlers who chose such names to express their spiritual attachment to the
land and people of the Bible.
When they thought of Palestine, they recalled the Jewish kingdom of ancient
times.
In their prayers, they prayed for the return of the Jews to the Holy Land.
A Baptist minister named Daniel Parker brought twenty-five families from
Illinois to settle in eastern Texas in the 1830s. When they formally
established the town of Palestine, in 1846, they named it after Rev.
Parker's hometown of Palestine, Illinois. That name had been
chosen because the beauty of that part of Illinois reminded its first
settlers of the land of milk and honey, Palestine, according to the
official account by the Crawford County (Illinois) Historical Society.
Americans were aware that Palestine had some Arab residents. Mark Twain
had mentioned them in his account of his visit to the Holy Land, The
Innocents Abroad (1869), as had Herman Melville in his famous Clarel: A
Poem and the Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876).
But it was common knowledge that the Arab population of Palestine was
relatively small and unsettled.
H. Allen Tupper, Jr. wrote in the New York Times in 1896, after having
ridden on horseback more than four hundred miles through Palestine and
Syria, that virtually the only local people he encountered were merchantmen
with their long camel trains and wild Bedouin tribes that reside in one
locality not more than two months.
Moreover, the Arab residents of 19th-century Palestine did not consider
themselves Palestinians.
They regarded Palestine not as a separate country, but as the southern part
of Syria.
As the Arab scholar Zeine N. Zeine wrote in 1973: The world in which the
Arabs and Turks lived together was, before the end of the 19th century,
politically a non-national world.
The vast majority of the Muslim Arabs did not show any nationalist or
separatist tendencies except when the Turkish leaders themselves, after
1908, asserted their own nationalism.
If there had been a conflict between the Arab and Jewish residents of
Palestine in the 1800s, the original residents of Palestine,
Texas,undoubtedly would have sided with the Jews, whose claim to the land
is clear from the Bible that Christians and Jews both cherish. It is for
the same reason that Bible-believing Christians today --probably including
more than a few residents of Palestine, Texas and Palestine, Illinois--
constitute one of the major sources of pro-Israel sentiment in the United
States.
"the earth will be full of the knowledge of G-d like the waters cover the
seas" (Isaiah 11:9)
NOW INDEX
HOME