What Are Jews, A Religion Or A Nationality ?

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                       

I used to think of my being as a Jew a religion when filling out forms, but now I feel that it is truly a nationality.  Let me explain:

It all started with a twin called Jacob.  His twin brother was Esau.  Jacob had problems to solve back then and it is said that he wrestled with a divine being,  an angel and won, causing him to be given the name, Israel to show this.  The problem that was to be solved was probably what to do about his twin, Esau.  The story in the Torah tells of their issues. 

According to Jewish history, Jacob, also known as Israel, lived from approximately 1652 BCE to 1505 BCE. He was born 2108 years after Creation and lived 147 years. This places his life between the years 1652 BCE and 1505 BCE.    This was about 3,677 years ago.  Abraham was born in about 1948 BCE with father, Terah from Mesopotamia. His city was Ur, situated on the Euphrates River (Tigris and Euphrates).   

Jacob is a central figure in the Book of Genesis, as the third of the Jewish patriarchs. He is the son of Isaac and Rebekah, and the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. They were from Mesopotamia from the city of Ur of the Chaldees. Jacob had twelve sons, who became the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel. 

Jacob had two wives and two concubines that became wives, and through them had 12 sons and a daughter.   Later, the Assyrians attacked the 10 northern tribes, taking them with them as hostages, slaves, and  trading in human traffic deals with other countries.  The tribe of Judah was left in the southern end of Israel, a united country, along with Benjamin and some of Simeon.  

We Jews come from the tribe of Judah.  Judah went to Egypt during a drought.  Their land had had no rain and crops were not growing.  During this famine, Jacob and his family of 70 people moved to Egypt. 

While they initially went to Egypt to find food, they eventually became enslaved there. Between living and being taken as slaves there, they spent 400 years in Egypt when Moses came along to take them out on the Exodus.  In the 70 were the extended family and servants.  They took all their animals, too.  They had been shepherds since Abraham's days.  

Moses was our lawgiver, prophet, and founder of the Jewish religion.  He  was born in Egypt to Amram and Jochebed of the tribe of Levi.  Levi was the 3rd son of Jacob and Leah.  Together with his brother, Simeon, he avenged the dishonoring of his sister, Dinah, by slaying the men of Shechem (Gen.34).  

For this deed they were rebuked by Jacob who forecast that  their descendants would be scattered throughout Israel (Gen 49:7). Then during the 2nd Temple Period when all contact with gentile women was avoided, the act of Levi and Simeon was praised.  Levi had one daughter, Jochebed and 3 sons, Gershom, Kohath (whose son Amram was the father of Moses), and Merari.                 

When Moses obtained the release of the Israelites, he found he had them and others in the group.  The census when they left Egypt showed there were 603, 550 people.  When the 2nd census was taken before they arrived in Canaan, they had 601,730.  They had lost 1,820 people through old age, disease or attacks from places they had to march through.  

We come from this group except a few who may have undergone conversion, perhaps in Italy.  DNA testing shows the haplotype of men and women.  J1 is the majority of the males.                                    

• Haplogroup J1, specifically the J-P58 subgroup, is found at a high frequency among many men of Jewish ancestry, especially Ashkenazi Jews.
• J1 is considered a Semitic haplogroup and has a strong presence in the Arabian Peninsula, where it accounts for a large percentage of male lineages.
• This suggests a shared ancestral origin in the Middle East for both Jewish and some Arab populations, as well as those in Southern Europe and North Africa.
• The J1-P58 branch is thought to have expanded from the southern Levant (Israel, Palestine, Jordan) during the Bronze Age.
• Within Jewish populations, specific subclades of J1 downstream of P58, like ZS227, are associated with the Cohanim priestly lineage. 
• My Jewish paternal grandfather from Lithuania was a Q.
• Haplogroups: Y-DNA haplogroups represent paternal lineage. Haplogroup Q is typically associated with populations in Central Asia and Siberia, and it is found in various ethnic groups, including many Native Americans.
• Khazar Theory: The Khazar hypothesis suggests that a significant portion of Ashkenazi Jews may have descended from the Khazar Empire, which converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th centuries. This theory posits that the Khazars, a Turkic people, intermingled with Jewish communities, contributing to the genetic makeup of Ashkenazi Jews.

So, we are from a family in Mesopotamia that was migrant, passing on into Egypt and Canaan, who are followers of the teaching of Moses, now called Jews.  We might answer as  Mesopotamian Jews, but we answer with the latest information, ie, American Jews or Israeli Jews, etc.

  The estimated world Jewish population is 15.7 million, which is approximately 0.2% of the global population. We're not even 1% of the world;  only a teeny fraction of 1%.  

This number includes those who self-identify as Jewish and those with Jewish parentage who may not identify as Jewish. There are 8 billion people in the world.