Nadene Goldfoot
Judah was the 4th son of Leah and Jacob. That wasn't a special position to be in considering his father would have 12 sons. In fact, we could consider him to have been a terrible brother! It was he who persuaded his brothers to sell his 11th brother, Joseph to some passing Ishmaelites rather than leave him to die in a pit. Joseph had the distinction of being the 1st son of Rachel who died giving birth to her 2nd, Benjamin. Most of these sons were the sons of Leah, Rachel's sister or two from her handmaid-thus Rachel's property. They all knew that it was Rachel who had been their father's favorite wife. They felt that Joseph had taken advantage of this position. Whose idea was it to get rid of Joseph in the first place? They were all jealous of him, knowing Joseph was the favorite of their father.
Part of the hatred was actually Joseph's own fault. Firstly, he used to report back to their father that they were not caring properly for his flocks. Secondly, he angered them by sharing one of his dreams, in which the whole family symbolically bowed down to him. And finally, his father Jacob had given him a many-coloured coat as a sign of his favour. Angry and jealous, they hated him so much that they could no longer bear to speak to him. But then he was only 17 when they sold him to the Ishmaelites for 20 pieces of silver.
"The brothers felt that Joseph was a threat not so much to them as to the family's destiny. they knew that the weeding out process that banished Ishmael and Esau from the choseness of Israel was to be over in their generation, so that the mission of the Patriarchs could go forward with them. But if Joseph were to bring dissension into the family, he would destroy this potential with untold consequences. If so, then he had to be judged as a traitor and a danger to them all," so said the teachings of the Sages about this history.
Things got so bad that the brothers decided to do away with him. One day when Joseph went to the fields to check up on them and found them in Dothan, , they threw him into a pit and discussed how best to kill him. During this discussion, one of the brothers – Judah – came up with a different plan. He proposed that they get rid of him by selling him to a group of passing merchants instead.
They succeeded. Meanwhile, these passing Ishmaelites, who were Medanites, had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, a courtier of Pharaoh, the Chamberlain of the Butchers.
Despite the seniority of Reuben, Simeon, and Levi, he received Jacob's patriarchal blessing when he was dying, telling each son this future. (Gen. 49-8). Jacob said to Judah,"You, your brothers shall acknowledge; Your hand will be at your enemies' nape; your father's son will prostrate themselves to you. A lion cub is Judah; from the prey, my son, you elevated yourself. He crouches, lies down like a lion, and like an awesome lion, who dares rouse him? The scepter shall not depart from Judah now a scholar from among his descendants until Shiloh arrives, and his will be an assemblage of nations. He will tie his donkey to the vine; to the vine branch his donkey's foal; he will launder his garments in wine and his robe in blood of grapes. Red eyed from wine, and white toothed from milk."
Until Shiloh arrives is prophetic, all right. That was the 1st cult center of the Israelite religion after the conquest of Canaan under Joshua. It was situated 25 miles North of Jerusalem in the Mts. of Ephraim. The Ark and Tabernacle were kept there during the period of the Judges, serving as the central national shrine and object of pilgrimage, especially during the long priesthood of Eli. When this arrived, it was the end of Judah's control as the center was Jerusalem, in Judah. Today Shiloh is in Judah but it's also the West Bank.
Shiloh has been positively identified with modern Khirbet Seilun, a tell known in Modern Hebrew as Tel Shiloh. It is located 31 kilometres (19 mi) north of Jerusalem, in the West Bank, to the west of the modern Israeli settlement town of Shilo and to the north of the Palestinian town of Turmus Ayya.
The area received by the tribe of Judah was one of the largest in Canaan and it eventually absorbed also the inheritance of Simeon in the Negev. David belonged to this tribe and his accession signaled its assuming a leading position over other tribes.
Incidentally, the Negev of Simeon is "dry-land" of Israel extending over an expanse of 5,138 sq miles; 60% of the total area of the country. Annual rainfall here is less than 200 mm. Simeon was told that his family would be dispersed and they were. They came to live in Arab land of Seir, a mountainous country of Edom-the descendants of Esau, who replaced the Horites, and some settled in the Mountains of Ephraim. It's cooler in mountains. I lived in Safed, on top of a mountain in upper Galilee. We also had a cooling breeze.
In 597-586 BCE, Zedekiah was the last king of Judah. In 586 BCE, the Babylonians had attacked and large numbers of the Jews were being deported. The people tried to create a subject state under Gedaliah, a member of the former royal house but ended with his assassination in 582. Those deported exiles continued to cherish their national and religious ideals which made it possible to renew their Jewish life after 539 BCE in the area of the former kingdom of Judah.
The Romans burned down Jerusalem and the 2nd Temple in 70 CE, almost bringing the end to Judaism.
Moses Montefiore -British
Isaac-Adolphe Cremieux-FrenchThe modern legal attempts to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people began in 1839 with a petition by Moses Montefiore to Sa'id (1784-1885) of Egypt for a Jewish homeland in the region of Palestine. He was an English philanthropist who had amassed a comfortable fortune as a broker, from collaborating with Rothchild and retired from business when 40 years old. He was the 1st English Jew to be knighted. He went to Palestine with A. Cremieux(1796-1880) a French Jew in 1840 as he was concerned about the "Damascus Affair". He visited Palestine 7 times with the last visit when he was 90 years old! Cremieux's children converted to Christianity, causing him to end his presidency of the Central consistory of French Jews in 1843. While he was in Egypt with Montefiore, he founded Jewish schools that he personally supported.
Those people who fled from the burning of Jerusalem and saw the destruction of Judah are called Jews today instead of Israelites. Jews have returned to their homeland of Israel as it is today. "The European powers mandated the creation of a Jewish homeland at the San Remo conference of 19–26 April 1920. In 1948, the State of Israel was established." Groups of Jews started returning in 1880 from Europe who were suffering from Pogroms against them. A group returning was called an Aliyah. There were about 5 aliyote that continued, populating the Ottoman Empire in familiar established sites.
Another movement to return started in " 1896, Theodor Herzl set out his vision of a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish
people in his book Der Judenstaat. He then proceeded to found the World Zionist Organization. The thing was that the situation for Jews was realized by Jews to be so terrible, that they needed the refuge of their own homeland. They had really been homeless, a wandering people, for almost 2,000 years. Yet they still existed, but on a 2nd class level-always. A 3rd class if truth be told, because they refused to become Christians and meld into the populations. Many Jews had lost the incentive to follow their religion exactly but they all had one thing in common; there was but one G-d; and some even questioned the one. Science was the field many naturally fell into and with that background, they questioned much. Even Theodor Herzl was not an Orthodox Jew, but he was people-minded; nationalistic towards his people. Theodor Herzl's real name was Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl (1860-1904) and was born in Budapest, Hungary. He became founder of Political Zionism. In 1891 he was Paris correspondent for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, and of course, being Jewish, was most interested in the "Jewish Problem " that others had with us. He was an activist, so his first thought was to present assimilation as a solution (G-d forbid)! That very same year was when Alfred Dreyfuss (1859-1935) was in the news, a Jew who was a captain and lieutenant in the French army and was being black-listed because of him being Jewish! This seemed to shake up all Jews now, including Herzl.
Herzl came to the conclusion that Jews were a people whose assimilation was impracticable and whose plight would deteriorate owing to its social and economic position; the solution was the founding of a Jewish state by international agreement. The territory must be chosen by the Jews but he personally favored Palestine. Although he at first was opposed by both assimilationists and ultra-Orthodox, his book rallied the Hibbat Zion Movement and its youth.
He returned to Vienna as literary editor of his paper. He gained the sympathy, though a temporary one, of the German kaiser William II whom he met at Constantinople and again in Palestine in 1898. By 1903 he received Britain's approval of Jewish settlement in Uganda, Africa suggested by Joseph Chamberlain. That was followed by a storm of protests. He talked with the Pope, the king of Italy, and he had to accept the fact that only Palestine would do. His heart gave out and he died in Austria. His novel, Altneuland, presents his Zionist ideas as embodied in a utopian Jewish state in Palestine.
The Jewish National Home as decided on April 24, 1920 included Judea and Samaria. Britain was granted a Mandate for Palestine on 25 April 1920 at the San Remo Conference, and, on 24 July 1922, this mandate was approved by ..the League of Nations. It was decided by people who had no idea of Israel or Judah or their history-both the non-Jews and even probably the Jews themselves, as who was really nationalistic? Against this troubling backdrop, the government of Prime Minister David Lloyd George—elected in December 1916—made the decision to publicly support Zionism, a movement led in Britain by Chaim Weizmann, (1874-1952) a Russian Jew who had settled in Manchester, England. Chaim was a Jewish chemist; a scientist. He was involved in Herzl's movement. Viscount Herbert Samuel (1870-1963) was also on board, a Jew in the British Parliament. He influenced the Balfour Declaration to be written.
Before the British occupation, Palestine was part of Ottoman Syria. The British army ruled Palestine until a civil administration was established on 1 July 1920.
We are Jews, the last remnant of the people of Judah, a direct line from Judah the 4th son of Jacob back to Abraham. As of 2023, the world's "core" Jewish population (those identifying as Jews above all else) was estimated at 16 million, 0.2% of the 8 billion worldwide population.
If you're wondering how large we had once been, 2 Samuel 6:1 describes “all the chosen men of Israel” as 30,000 in the time of David. 2 Samuel 24:9 gives the figures for David's census as 800,000 soldiers for Israel, and 500,000 for Judah. But Chronicles records that the same census found 1,100,000 for Israel and 470,000 for Judah. The Torah records the Exodus with Judah leaving Egypt with
74,600 and arriving with 76,500 40 years later.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_for_the_Jewish_people#:~:text=The%20European%20powers%20mandated%20the,State%20of%20Israel%20was%20established.
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