Thursday, February 27, 2020

How The Deep Ancestry of the Irish Connected to The Jews

Nadene Goldfoot
                                                                         
Ireland of the ancient days was not invaded by the Romans.  The Romans had  invaded England, though. 
                                              

In August 55 B.C. (55 years before Jesus was born) the Roman general, Emperor Julius Caesar,  invaded Britain which included England. He took with him two Roman legions. After winning several battles against the Celtic tribes (Britons) in south-east England,  he returned to France.  Of course the Romans left detailed information about Britain, but nothing about Ireland as they were not there.

England not only benefited from Roman writings, but also had history that was a loosely based fiction of Geoffrey of Monmouth-born in 1095, a history that was written for a purpose.  Geoffrey of Monmouth was a British cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British historiography and the popularity of tales of King Arthur.  He is known for The History of the Kings of BritainProphetiae MerliniVita Merlini.  

The Irish have their  Leabhar Gabhala, the Book of Invasions, that came to them from earlier writing of the late 11th century.  Like Geoffrey's History, it is a clear try to link Irish history to familiar events of the classical world, for it is a narrative about the origins of Ireland and the Gaels.  Monastic scribes compiled this book.  Christianity came to Ireland in the 5th Century.  St. Patrick, the bishop to Ireland from Roman-England,  was one of the earliest missionaries.  

"The Gaels are an ethno-linguistic group native to Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man in northwestern Europe. They are associated with the Gaelic languages: a branch of the Celtic languages comprising Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic. Wikipedia
Ireland1,770,000 (linguistic)

It tells about the invasion of Ireland by the Gaels.  These  ancestors of today's Celtic population  brought the Irish language. 
                                               

   Supposedly, the Gaels were descended from Milesius, and later by the epithet of Mile Easpain (the Soldier of  Spain).  In Irish origin myths, Míl Espáine or Míl Espáne is the mythical ancestor of the final inhabitants of Ireland, the "sons of Míl" or Milesians, who represent the vast majority of the Irish Gaels. His father was Bile, son of Breogan.  Mil, as he was called, was killed on an expedition to avenge the death of a nephew who had been killed by the Tuatha De Danaan, who were the previous occupiers and master of Ireland.  
                                             

Notice the braiding of his beard?  I've seen that done with vikings.  In 795 AD Viking longships began to raid various places in Ireland. At first they attacked the monasteries along the coast and later they raided inland. The Vikings were great experts at building boats which were used for long journeys. ... The Danish Vikings came to Ireland from about 849 AD and fought the Norse Vikings.  Danish Vikings were also in England during this period.  

While it’s recently been shown that Viking blood had a larger impact on Irish DNA than previously thought, one of the earliest Viking settlements established at the mouth of the Liffey survived to become what is now modern Dublin.

It was up to Mil's 3 sons, Eber, Eremon and Amairgen, to defeat the Tuatha and conquer Ireland.  When the brothers could not agree on the division of the island between them, Eber was killed by Eremon, who became the first High King to reign at Tara.  

The name of Eber is also found in Genesis of the Old Testament (Tanakh).  Eber was a great-grandson of Noah's son Shem and the father of Peleg born when Eber was 34 years old, and of Joktan. He was the son of Shelah, a distant ancestor of Abraham.  Abraham was born in the 2nd millennium BCE, or about 1948 BCE.  
I note that the Tanakh or Old Testament is full of battles and kings, the first being Saul  who lived between 1030-1020 BCE.  David, who was the next king, was born in 1010 BCE.  

Mil's wife, Scota, was also killed in the expedition and the Gaels of Ireland, considering her to be their ancestral mother, called themselves Scots for that reason.   It happens that the Romans referred to them as Scotti as well as the more familiar Hibernii.  
                                                     

 According to their story, the ultimate ancestor was Fennius Farsa, a Scythian king who lost his throne and fled to Egypt.  Now, ancient Scythia was north of the Black Sea in what is now the eastern Ukraine, between 2 great rivers, the Don and the Dnieper.   He was the son of Boath, a son of Magog. (In the Tanakh, Magog is the son of Japheth who is the son of Noah.)  Other sources describe his lineage from the line of Gomer. (Gomer was the wife of the prophet Hosea, mentioned in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Hosea.) According to some traditions, he invented the Ogham alphabet and the Gaelic language.  
                                             

When Fennius Farsa got to Egypt, his son, Nial married the pharaoh's daughter, and she had a son, naming him Goidel The whole family was banished from Egypt for refusing to join in the persecution of the Israelites (the Children of Israel), and so the family was forced to wander throughout northern Africa.  
                                             
We also know of Niall (who was an Irish king, the ancestor of the Uí Néill dynasties that dominated the northern half of Ireland from the 6th to the 10th century.) 
   


They finally crossed the Pillars of Hercules to settle in Spain, where they prospered.  That's amazing that they had as an ancestor a pharaoh relative refusing to be involved with persecution of Israelites.  It rather sounds like the time the Egyptians were chasing Moses and the Israelites after allowing them to leave, and they are about to embark on the Sea of Reeds.  
                                                    

Many years later, one of Goidel's descendants, Ith, saw a land far off across the seas from his perch in a watchtower on a cliff-top.  
Now we know you can't really see Ireland from Spain, but Ith saw something new to him.  He was so excited about it that he set sail with 90 warriors to find and explore what he thought he had seen.

He arrived at the mouth of the River Kenmare of SW Ireland.  Then he went north until he met some of the Tuatha De Danaan, the race that already inhabited Ireland.  It was a peaceful meeting at the start until the Danaan became wary and were afraid he would send for invaders.  They killed Ith but spared his crew who returned to Spain.  
                                                  

Ith's Uncle Mil decided to avenge his nephew's murder and set sail with his 8 sons and their wives and 36 chieftains, each with a ship full of warriors.  What an armada that must have been!  

Mil and his 8 sons defeated the Tuatha, but Mil was killed in battle.  The defeated Tuatha had chosen their name from their ancestral mother, Dana.  It turns out that the Tuatha were a race of gods, each with their own special attributes, similiar to the Greek stories of Olympus gods.  
                                                  

After this defeat they they fled to the Underworld and created a kingdom under the ground-where they could still harass their conquerors by depriving them of corn and milk.  This caused the Milesians into an agreement which divided Ireland into upper and lower parts.  To this day the Tuatha De Danaan are the guardians of the Underworld.  
                                                   
The Fomorians 

They were not the originals natives of Ireland, though.  They had ousted 2 earlier groups;  the Fir Bholg, a race of pre-Celtic humans and the Fomorians.  The Fir Bholg were banished to the Aran Islands in Galway Bay.  We do not know where they had come from.  Perhaps they were aboriginal, described as being short and dark, subsumed by later waves of Celtic arrivals.    The Fomorians were divine and more difficult to defeat, of coarse.  
                                                    
Another Fomorian


Their leader was the terrifying Balor of the Baleful Eye. This man's gaze could cause instant death.  Fomorians, if you haven't guessed, were a race of demons.  The prophecy was that one day Balor would be slain by his own grandson.  So he hid himself on Tory Island off the Donegal coast.  He didn't allow his daughter near men.  She got pregnant anyway and had triplets.  Balor found out, threw them all into the sea, but one survived.  Wouldn't you know it?  Lugh grew up to lead the Tuatha De Danaan against the Fomorians and Balor was killed with a slingshot through his one baleful eye.  
                                               

As history is in for surprises, I find that my own paternal grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfus, born in 1871, lived in Dublin, Ireland when he was a young man.  He was among many Jews of Lithuania and Ukraine who had migrated there.  
                                                 
Stanley Goldfoot shortly after arriving in "Palestine"
He became the Chief of Intelligence for the Stern Group
Remember the movie, EXODUS?
He's my 3rd cousin.  


It was around 1880 when Orthodox Russian Jews, forced to flee Tsarist persecution, began arriving in Ireland without any means of support, little secular education and no understanding of English.  The had to overcome poverty and antipathy to establish Jewish enclaves around the South Circular Road in Dublin and in townships and cities throughout Ireland.  They educated themselves from being peddlers to become professionals and entrepreneurs, and even took and active part in the Irish civil war and other major conflicts.  They engaged in politics and sport and achieved acclaim in literature, art and music.  Stanley Goldfoot was a cousin, born in Ireland who became a very well known Israeli.  He wrote, "A Letter to the World", about how he felt about Israel.  Stanley lived in Jerusalem.   
Chaim Herzog (1918–1997), sixth President of Israel, grew up in 33 Bloomfield Avenue. His father, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, a renowned Talmudic scholar, was the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, and later of Palestine and Israel. Yaakov Herzog son of Yitzhak was also born and lived with the family in Dublin.

Resource:Saxons, Vikings, and Celts by Bryan Sykes, p. 120-146.,
the genetic roots of Britain and Ireland.  
https://wwwrobinsongenealogy.blogspot.com/2020/02/robinson-discovery-of-irish-connection.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebor_Gab%C3%A1la_%C3%89renn
http://www.primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk/Romans.html
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/genealogy/vikings-change-ireland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9nius_Farsaid
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2018/05/remembering-letter-to-world-from.html
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2020/02/netflix-last-saxon-kingdoms-king-alfred.html
Book: Jewish Ireland, a social history, by Ray Rivlin 
geni.com  on Hertzog


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