My podcast guest this week could scarcely be more contentious. William Finck believes that Jesus was not actually a ‘Jew’ and that the true descendants of the Children of Israel are to be found not primarily in the Middle East but in the white European nations which used to be known collectively as Christendom.
If you happen to be a Christian of European descent it’s certainly a pleasing notion. When, for example, you recite these lines from Psalm 33 - “Blessed are the people, whose God is the Lord Jehovah: and blessed are the folk that he hath chosen to him to be his inheritance’ - you may, if Finck’s thesis is correct, experience the warm glow which comes from knowing that the Psalmist is talking about YOU.
But we’re in tricksy territory here. (And by the way, I’m going to park the even more contentious “was Jesus Jewish?” question to one side for a later article, once I’ve done a second podcast with Finck asking him to elaborate). It’s not just the Jews who think they have sole claim to the ‘God’s chosen people’ mantle. Many, if not most, of the world’s Christians are emphatically of the same opinion.
I used to be one of them. In my days as an edgy, outspoken, right-wing columnist I was a massive fan of the state of Israel, relishing its (supposedly) against-the-odds victories in the Six Day War and Yom Kippur, crowing that its economic success was a vindication of free-market capitalism, writing articles to the effect that it was a bastion of civilisation - and fundamental decency: look at the way their medics treated enemy combatants and civilians just as kindly as their own people! - surrounded by barbarous, chippy Islamist aggressor-states which had yet to emerge from the Dark Ages.
When you wake up, though, as I did during ‘Covid’, you start questioning all your prior assumptions. Almost everything I had been taught to think about the world - dinosaurs; Evolution; the Beatles; the Titanic; outer space; you name it - was, I realised, potentially a monstrous deception. And if I had got it so badly wrong about all those other subjects, how could I be sure that I hadn’t been similarly bedazzled, befuddled and misled on the subject of Jews, Jewishness and Israel?
Sure enough, I discovered that I had. It didn’t make me love my Jewish friends any less but it did cure of me of a longstanding hang-up I’d had in which I’d half-wished I’d been born Jewish myself. Why had I wanted to be Jewish? All the obvious reasons, such as that the Jews I knew seemed to punch above their weight in terms of intelligence, wit, humour, vocabulary and general Menschishness. Not to mention their affluence. And their clan loyalty. Also, the clever way they’ve managed to have their cake and eat it: eternal victims of history’s worst crime on the one hand; fabulously brilliant overachievers on the other; marginalised outsiders, yet, simultaneously, innermost members of the in-crowd. Oh - that and the fact that they were literally God’s chosen people, of course.
Are the Jews really God’s chosen people, though? Possibly. Some of them. But to answer that question you first have to decide what is meant by the word ‘Jew’, which is more complicated than you might think. For example, in the Second Century BC, under the governance of Maccabean leader and high priest John Hyrcanus, the populace of Judaea was forcibly converted to the religion of Judaea (first called ‘Judaism’ by the Greeks). While this may have made them ‘Jews’ by religious affiliation, it didn’t make them inheritors of the Abrahamic covenant by birthright. That’s because Judaea, by that stage, was a multiracial, polyglot nation containing large numbers of Canaanites and Edomites. These, you will recall from your Old Testament reading, are among the tribes that God enjoined the Children of Israel to destroy - and so, you might not unreasonably argue, the very opposite of His ‘chosen people.’
But are the claims to that title by white Europeans any stronger? Well Finck certainly thinks so. If you go to his website Christogenea.org you’ll find reams of information on the subject, including a 14-hour (!) video series titled 100 Proofs the Israelites were White.I’ve only managed to watch the first few episodes. These cover the great migration of the Israelite tribes after their periods in captivity and exile. Finck’s argument is that they headed northward, crossing the mountains of the Caucasus (which may be why white people are referred to as ‘Caucasians’) and spreading out from there. The Germanic tribes (Franks, Saxons, Angles, Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Belgae, Cymbri, etc) which swarmed across Europe in the first half of the first Millennium AD were descendants of the Israelite tribes.
His conjecture is supported both by archaeological records and contemporaneous accounts, from the Assyrian and Babylonian court records to historians such as Herodotus, Tacitus and Livy. The Israelites were recognised as a very distinctive people and were given different names over the centuries. In Assyria they were known as Cymri/Khumri (after the king, Omri, from whom they were thought to descend), and by the Babylonians Gimiri, which later mutated into the term Cimmerians. The Persians called them Sakea or Saca Suni which, at least one historian has argued, is the origin of the word ‘Saxon’. They were also known as Scythians (tent dwellers) and, by the Greeks, Galatea, a term derived from their fondness for milk.
This isn’t the first time I’ve come across these theories. But you generally only find such information in hard-to-track-down, often out-of-print books like George F Jowett’s The Drama Of The Lost Disciples or the works of Baram Blackett and Alan Wilson, who traced the westward migration of the lost tribes by noting the remarkable similarities between Welsh, Etruscan and ancient Hebrew. You’d think by now that someone would have turned this story into a bestselling popular history book. Imagine the potential audience!
It’s never going to happen, though, is it? In my Normie days, I would probably have assumed that the reason for this is that these theories are cranky and have been debunked by all the ‘experts.’ Now I think it more likely that they’re bang on the money but that they have been variously ridiculed or suppressed by vested interests.
I can imagine all sorts of reasons why The Powers That Be would wish to suppress the truth. One is the devastating effect it would have on White Identity politics, which at the moment is mainly about skin colour and culture and tradition, but which would explode into a new level of intensity were it also to be about Biblical prophecy and divine approval. Another, obviously, is the potential repercussions for the state of Israel, a good part of whose perceived legitimacy derives from the widely promoted notion that it wasn’t stolen by interlopers but was merely reclaimed in 1948 by the people to whom it has always rightfully belonged.
But I suspect that the most widespread resistance to the idea will come not from Jews, oddly enough, but from Christians. Especially those - like the estimated 30 million in America - of a Zionist persuasion. This is the audience Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu is addressing when he quotes Old Testament scripture, which he tends only to do in English because it’s a message he’s directing to a very specific constituency. When, for example, in an October 2023 press conference he invoked ‘Amalek’ he was sending out a clear signal to his Christian supporters in America: that any atrocities he committed against the Palestinians while fighting Hamas had Biblical legitimacy, because annihilation was what God wanted the Children of Israel to do to the Amalekites.
Zionist Christians, who outnumber Jewish Zionists by about 30 to 1, tend to be very sure of what constitutes the correct - and incorrect - Christian position on such matters as “Israel”. But then, in my experience, so do Christians of most other persuasions too. Whether they are Catholics, Orthodox, Calvinists, Baptists, Evangelicals or whatever else, they tend to believe what they’ve been brought up to believe by their preferred trusted authority.
This is why the Christians whose opinions I value most tend to be of the Awake variety. Once you realise that They (I mean the Baddies who run the world, not Christians) have lied to you about everything else, it’s no longer such a stretch to accept the possibility that those lies might extend even unto the Bible, its various translations, its potential meanings and the very nature of Christian doctrine. Christians who blithely accept whatever they’ve been brought up to believe by their pastor, priest, minister or whoever - are too often also the kind of Christians who asked why you weren’t wearing a mask and whether you’d had your clot shot yet during ‘Covid’.
In other words most Christians, regrettably, are Normies. And this mental shortcoming, a form of blindness, becomes a major obstacle when you’re trying to introduce them to any idea which contradicts their embedded preconceptions, most especially where Christianity is concerned. Often they’ll take refuge in the idea that scripture is inspired, the literal word of God. And they really don’t know how to respond when you say: “OK. Which version: Septuagint or Masoretic texts? And which translation? And whose exegesis?”
Details matter. Take, for example, the word ‘Gentiles’, which most Christians take as read to mean ‘non-Jew’. But does it really? Not in the Greek of the Septuagint it doesn’t, where the word “ethnos” - from which we derive ‘ethnic’ - is probably better translated as “nations” or “peoples”. It was Jerome who introduced the G word in his 2nd century ‘Vulgate’ version, where he used the Latin word ‘gentilis’. This in term was translated into the clumsy English neologism ‘gentiles.’
I’m certainly in no position to declare, ex cathedra, that white Europeans are the true inheritors of the mantle ‘Children of Israel.’ But there do seem to be plenty of historical clues to support it, such as the suggestion that the river Danube was so named because that region was colonised by the tribe of Dan. I’m puzzled by the sniffy tone of articles like this historical factoid salad published by Larouche, which seeks to dismiss what it calls Christian Identity and the ‘British Israel’ movement as some kind of psyop promoted by Venice’s top psychological warfare officer Paolo Sarpi. Well hang on. Making an argument on the basis that various political interests felt they could benefit from promoting a theory for nefarious reasons is a classic case of the ‘Motive Fallacy’. It tells us nothing as to whether the theory might or might not be well grounded.
Of course Christian belief has been manipulated by vested interests from generation to generation. That is why I call Christianity the greatest of all the rabbit holes. Once you start looking into Christian doctrine and realising how widely it differs from denomination to denomination - the Church can’t even agree on how many books to include in the Bible or on whether or not Mary is the ‘Queen of Heaven’ - you cannot help come to the conclusion: “Well they can’t all be right.” Which then means that, if you are remotely intellectually curious, you have to start asking the kind of questions that none of the churches want you to ask, foremost of which are: “OK. So where did they get these ideas? Which ones are scripturally and historically viable? And which are the accretions of political factionalism?”
I don’t buy into some of what Zionist Christians believe, for example, because they are too obviously under the influence of some heavy duty 19th century campaigning by dubious characters like John Nelson Darby, not to mention the even more suspect Cyrus I Scofield and his worryingly influential Scofield Study Bible. Also, sorry, but anyone who looks at what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing in Gaza and says: “Ah but it’s OK. He’s a man of God, doing the Lord’s work” seriously needs to refamiliarise themselves with the four Gospels, look at the teachings of the main character and ask themselves what He might thought of it all.
Of course, I might be completely wrong to get all excited about William Finck and his Christian Identity theories. Clearly, I have a dog in this fight because as a white European and a Christian I really rather fancy the idea that I might be descended from one of those entertaining brothers in Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned during the five or so years I’ve spent properly down the rabbit hole, it’s that just because a theory is ridiculed by ‘authority’ doesn’t mean that it’s not actually true. In fact, the more ridiculed it is by ‘authority’, the more my antennae start to twitch…
