JD Hall, Insight to Incite, May 18, 2026
For centuries, there’s been credible and widespread doubts that the Ashkenazi are really the genetic lineage of Abraham, if for no other reason, the Ashkenazi themselves didn’t start to allege it until after claims of an ancient, ancestral land deed became a central justification for the establishment of a Jewish ethno-state in Palestine. I’ve said for years that all signs point to the Ashkenazi not being Semitic, that one theory stands out to me as the most likely explanation for their origin, but have remained non-committal. After all, historic Christianity rejects the notion of Covenant entitlements outside of faith in Jesus, so why does it matter? But while researching Abraham’s posterity for my articles on Noah’s prophecy to Japheth, I discovered irrefutable evidence, never before published, that points to one theory in particular that undeniably and irrefutably shows where the Ashkenazi origin story.
“…which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie” (Revelation 3:9)
American support for Israel is at an all-time low, and according to sources in Israel, it’s a cause for existential concern. Those low polling numbers are an impressive feat, because following the establishment of Israeli statehood through the use of terrorism perpetrated on the West, the Lavon Affair, the U.S.S. Liberty, constant spy scandals, the theft of our uranium, targeted political assassinations, JFK publicly warning of Israel’s undue influence on America’s political system, the American public held a much lower opinion of Israel than in recent years.
What largely changed that sentiment was the partnership between Israel and America’s evangelicals, which kicked off with Israel’s gift to Jerry Falwell of a private jet in 1979. That gift, and the loyalty of American evangelicals that followed, has produced nearly 45 years of free public relations support and fanatical loyalty by Bible Belt Christians. A highly engineered, well-oiled machine of lobbying power from groups like Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and others, serving as unofficial lobbying arms of the Israeli state, have enough FARA evasions to make JFK roll over in his grave. And the entire Dispensational Industrial Complex runs on a single claim: The physical descendants of Abraham hold a divine land deed to the territory currently occupied by the State of Israel, and that deed has never expired.
Accompanying that claim is the belief that American Christians are morally obligated to support Israel’s ambitions and undergird their security with our money, our votes, and if necessary, our sons. But is it true?
That’s a one-part question with a two-part answer. No, it isn’t true that Jews who reject Jesus have access to the blessings and promises of God’s Covenant with Abraham. The New Testament couldn’t be clearer that those promises are fulfilled in Jesus and are inherited by Christians who embrace Him, not by Jews who reject Him. Entire chapters of the Bible, like Galatians, and whole Books of the Bible, like Hebrews, are dedicated to this concept. The historic Christian Church has always believed that rejecting Christ forfeits that Covenant, and it would have rejected Ted Cruz’s interpretation of Genesis 12, had it existed prior to the 19th century. Because there is no ethnic partiality with God, the relevance of their origin story wanes in importance.
But the second part of the answer deals not with what the ethnic ancestors of Abraham might inherit, but who the ethnic ancestors of Abraham might really be. This answer is often portrayed as a collection of “conspiracy theories,” and any hint that you believe Israelis are actually a nation of carpet-bagging Europeans cosplaying as ancient Hebrews who have fabricated fictitious, Hebrew-sounding surnames and invented a new form of “Hebrew” that is about 90% not Hebrew in order to play the part, and you’re dismissed as a tinfoil hat-wearing weirdo who’s drunk on conspiracy theories. Jon Harris did that in his article defending Dispensationalism, which I responded to here at Insight to Incite, casually dismissing the genetic argument with a hand-wave and audible guffaw like it’s tantamount to thinking the CIA killed Kennedy and fluoride is making the frogs gay.
The problem for them is that it is indeed an important debate, and proving an actual ethnic lineage to Abraham, which should be easy, isn’t. For starters, following the fall of the Temple in 70 AD, the rabbis of this new religion exchanged ancient rules for inclusion, shifting from patrilineal to matrilineal descent, and they loosened the strict definitions of what was required to be considered Jewish. They also allowed Gentiles to be officially considered “Jewish” if they converted, another unbiblical adaptation that would’ve had the Pharisees of the Bible incensed. Combine those two things with the fact that the Temple’s destruction also destroyed Israel’s genealogical records, and what you’ve got is tantamount to Washington DC losing everyone’s birth certificates and passport information. Proving who is a real Jew by Biblical standards is harder than they would like you to think.
It doesn’t help their case that Ashkenazi scholars and geneticists have been the loudest voices in this debate, and they claim that substantial proportions of modern Jewry are in no way related to Abraham. Arthur Koestler, the celebrated Jewish Hungarian novelist and journalist, argued in his 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe that Ashkenazi Jews descend from non-Semitic converts. A.N. Poliak, professor of medieval Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, argued that the large majority of world Jewry descends from non-Israelite converts. His colleague at Tel Aviv University, linguist Paul Wexler, reached the same conclusion. Joseph Reinach, a French Jewish member of parliament, stood at the Versailles Peace Conference and argued that the majority of Russian, Polish, and Galician Jews descended from non-Israelite stock. Rabbi Samuel Kohn argued in 1884 that Hungarian Jews shared ethnic descent from non-Israelite peoples. Isidore Loeb, a rabbi, historian, and secretary of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, wrote in 1885 that many German and Russian Jews descended from non-Israelite converts. Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argued in his 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish People that the concept of a Jewish ethnic people descended from ancient Israelites is largely a modern political construction. These are not antisemitic agitators. They are rabbis, university professors, parliamentarians, and prize-winning authors, and they are Jewish, every one of them.
After years of being non-committal on which theory best describes their real origin story, sufficing it to say that no ancestral land grant exists anyway, I’m now ready to commit, having recently come across irrefutable evidence for the validity of one specific theory in particular. To explain this theory and why it’s irrefutable, I’ve divided the argument into five simple steps that, at the end of which, you’ll have arrived at the correct destination. These include (1) Ashkenaz, son of Gomer, son of Japheth (2) Javan and Madai: The Greeks and Persians of Genesis 10 (3) Josephus on the Ashkenaz (4) John Gill on Ashkenaz and Germany, and (5) Eran Elhaik and the Genetics.
At the end of these five steps, your mind will be blown.
THE ASHKENAZI
Before we get to step one, let me lay out who the Ashkenazi are today, and then we’ll get to who they were yesterday. Roughly eighty percent of the world’s Jewish population, and approximately half of Israel’s, are Ashkenazi Jews. The case that Ashkenazi Jews are biological descendants of the ancient Israelites has been collapsing under genetic and historical scrutiny for decades. What replaced it is not a conspiracy theory cooked up by bad actors on the internet. It is peer-reviewed genetic science conducted by an Israeli researcher, corroborated by the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, confirmed by first-century Jewish historiography, and anticipated by Protestant biblical commentary written centuries before anyone was arguing about Zionism.
What I am asking is not that you take my word for it. What I am asking is that you look at it. Anyone willing to spend fifteen minutes with the actual sources will find that the genetic, historical, and biblical evidence all point in the same direction, and that the direction is not the one the Dispensational machine has been pointing for a hundred years.
I’ll begin where the Bible begins. In Genesis 10, there is a man named Ashkenaz. He is not a mystery. His lineage is not ambiguous. And the name his descendants eventually gave to the largest Jewish population on earth deserves more than a dismissive wave. Hold your conclusions until we have laid out every piece. The argument will stand on its own.
ASHKENAZ, SON OF GOMER, SON OF JAPHETH
Genesis 10 is the Table of Nations, Moses’s record of where every people on earth came from after the flood. Ashkenaz appears in verse 3 as a son of Gomer, who appears in verse 2 as a son of Japheth. The line is Noah, then Japheth, then Gomer, then Ashkenaz. He shows up again in 1 Chronicles 1:6, same genealogy, no changes. He appears a third time in Jeremiah 51:27, where the prophet summons the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz to march against Babylon, placing his descendants geographically in what is now Armenia and the southern Caucasus. That is exactly where the Table of Nations puts Japheth’s branch of humanity.
Ashkenaz is a Japhethite. He has no connection to Shem’s line whatsoever. This is not a contested reading. Calvin, Matthew Poole, Matthew Henry, John Gill, Albert Barnes, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown all handle the genealogy the same way. The man’s lineage is not in dispute.
Medieval Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley called the Germanic territory where they lived “Ashkenaz.” Obviously, the most likely and logical explanation is that the Jews who settled the Rhine Valley were of the Ashkenaz lineage, right? Any reasonable person would assume this. But if modern Jews admitted this, that would mean Ashkenazi Jews are not the lineage of Abraham, and suddenly the bulk of Israel would have no divine right to the land. What they need you to believe is that the region was called that because it was settled by the lineage of Ashkenaz, and that around the Middle Ages, Jews who happened to live there also took the name, not because they’re in the lineage of Ashkenaz, but because they very coincidentally lived in a region named after Ashkenaz.
Any rational person would call that improbable. But I can admit that, theoretically, that explanation is technically and hypothetically possible, even though it’s unlikely. Israel’s very existence is dependent upon evangelicals believing they have a lineage lease on the land, so they’re not going to cave on that story any time soon, so we’ll move on to the next exhibit.
STEP ONE: JAVAN AND MADAI, THE GREEKS AND PERSIANS IN GENESIS 10
The Table of Nations also identifies the Greeks and the Persians by name. Genesis 10:2 lists the sons of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, and Tiras.
Javan is the Biblical name for Greece, and this is undisputed, with every major Biblical commentary agreeing that the Greeks descend from Japheth through Javan, two generations from Noah.
Madai is the Biblical name for the Medes, the people of ancient Media, occupying what is now northwestern Iran. The Medes also descend from Japheth, two generations from Noah through Madai. Madai and Ashkenaz are uncle and great-nephew, both within two generations of Japheth, occupying adjacent territories in the same Caucasus and Anatolian regions.
To recap, the Greeks are Japhethites, and the Medes and Persians are Japhethites. Neither people has any genealogical connection to Abraham, to Shem, or to the Israelite line. They are within the branch of humanity that descends from Japheth, sitting in the same geographic territory assigned to his sons by the Table of Nations.
I know this all seems irrelevant, and you’re wondering why it matters. Hold that thought.
JOSEPHUS ON ASHKENAZ
Flavius Josephus wrote his Antiquities of the Jews in the first century AD, and in Book 1, Chapter 6, he maps the Table of Nations onto the peoples his readers would recognize. When he reaches Ashkenaz, he says this, “Of the three sons of Gomer, Ashkenaz founded the Ashkenazis, who are now called by the Greeks Rheginians.”
Josephus is not writing theology and has no dog in the fight as to modern geopolitics. He’s the most prominent, respected historian of the ancient world, who modern historians have come to rely upon for virtually everything. He is writing an ethnography and identifies Ashkenaz’s descendants as the Rheginians. The meaning of that word is lost on us, and it’s been a source of debate for millennia. But what is agreed upon by scholars is that there are four possible meanings of “Rheginians,” all of which place Ashkenaz’s descendants in the Caucasus, Anatolian, or Iranian region, and none of them places them anywhere near Germany.
Josephus, writing in the first century as a Jewish historian with no stake in any modern controversy, puts the Ashkenazi in the same eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus territory that Genesis 10 assigns to Japheth’s branch of humanity. He is a disinterested witness, has no argument to make about modern Jewish identity, and is just following the facts where they go, and where they go is not the Rhine Valley.
To reiterate, we know the Ashkenazi “Jews” ended up in Germany eventually. Their claim is that they started calling themselves Ashkenazi not because they’re related to Ashkenaz, but because Ashkenaz’s descendants had previously settled there and named the area in Germany after themselves. Ergo, “Ashkenazi Jews” is a reference to the geographical location they ultimately migrated to in Germany, not to their ethnic ancestry, and it’s all one big misunderstanding.
The problem with this is that Josephus gives the geographical location for where the descendants of Ashkenaz settled, and it’s exactly where the Bible says the descendants of Ashkenaz settled, and it’s nowhere near Germany. What that means is that their claim is bogus. They’re called Ashkenazi Jews not because that’s the name of the region in Germany they settled in, but because they are Ashkenaz’s descendants, and the region in Germany is named after them, not the other way around.
JOHN GILL ON ASHKENAZ AND GERMANY
John Gill was an eighteenth-century English Reformed Baptist pastor, the predecessor to Spurgeon at the London Metropolitan Tabernacle, and one of the most exhaustive biblical commentators in the Protestant tradition. His commentary on Genesis 10:3 documents what the Protestant exegetical tradition had always understood: Ashkenaz was a Japhethite, his descendants settled in the region of Pontus near the Euxine Sea, and the country of the Caucasus was called Aschanez by the Armenians after him. Gill then notes that Germany is called Ashkenaz in the Hebrew language to this day because Ashkenaz’s descendants settled there, and that the Jews living there bear his name because they are those descendants.
Gill wrote, “Ashkenaz seated himself in the lesser Asia, in Pontus and Bithynia, where were some traces of his name in the river Ascanius, and in the Ascanian lake or bay… the Euxine Pontus, or Axeine, as it was first called, which is the sea that separates Asia and Europe, and is no other than a corruption of the sea of Ashkenaz. It seems to have been near Armenia, by its being mentioned along with Minni or Armenia, in Jeremiah 51:27. Germany is by the Jews commonly called Ashkenaz; perhaps some of the posterity of Ashkenaz in Asia might pass into Europe, and Germany might be a colony of them.”
Granted, Gill used the words “perhaps” and “might,” but he is being humble. What he is doing is making the most coherent explanation for who the Jews are who reside there, and one of the most renowned Bible commentators in the Protestant tradition is positing that the Ashkenazi Jews are actually descendants of Japheth – ethnic Japhethites who migrated from Asia into Germanic territory and carried the name of their ancestor with them. What is so powerful about this conclusion is that Gill reached it far outside the modern debate, arriving at the same place that genetics would reach 250 years later.
Matthew Poole makes the same identification. The connection between Gomer’s line and the peoples of northern and central Europe was standard Protestant commentary, with Gomer himself identified as the ancestor of the Germanic and Celtic peoples. These men were not making a political argument. They were doing straightforward exegesis of Genesis 10 centuries before Christian Zionism existed and before anyone was fighting over Palestinian real estate.
What Gill establishes, without intending to establish anything beyond the plain meaning of the text, is that the Jewish communities of Germany were living in Japhethite territory, bearing Japhethite names, and descended from a Japhethite people. The commentaries all record this without controversy and without an agenda.
ERAN ELHAIK AND THE GENETICS
Eran Elhaik is an Israeli-American geneticist, born in Israel in 1980, who completed his PhD in molecular evolution at the University of Houston in 2009 and followed it with two postdoctoral fellowships at Johns Hopkins, one at the School of Medicine and one at the School of Public Health. He has been an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden since 2019. His h-index is 34 with over 13,000 citations. He is not a crank. He is not a white supremacist. He is an Israeli scientist with Johns Hopkins credentials whose own people’s origin story is what he decided to investigate.
His findings are not too complicated to summarize. Using a method called Geographic Population Structure analysis, Elhaik traced the genetic origins of Ashkenazi Jews and localized the majority of them to a specific region: the ancient trade routes of northeastern Turkey, in villages whose very names resemble the word Ashkenaz. His conclusion was that the primary source population for Ashkenazi Jews was not Semitic Israelites dispersed from Palestine, but rather Greco-Iranian converts to Judaism living in Anatolia, with the conversions occurring in the early centuries AD. The Greeks, Turks, and the Iranians who converted were not a random assortment of people who happened to be in the neighborhood. They were the dominant ethnic groups in that region at that time.
The response from the Jewish academic establishment was exactly what you would expect. Prominent geneticists called his methodology flawed. Others called him a liar and a fraud. Harry Ostrer refused to share genetic data with him on the grounds that it might be used to defame the Jewish people. The attacks were personal in a way that peer-reviewed scientific disagreements typically are not, which is itself worth noting. That’s what happens when science confirms the evidence that the bulk of Israelis would not have a land grant for Israel, if such a thing even existed. It had to be attacked. It’s existential, because Israel is hanging on by a thread held by American evangelicals who believe in Ted Cruz’s Bible interpretations.
His findings stand. And what they show is that the people who call themselves Ashkenazi Jews trace genetically to Greeks and Iranians (who are Japhethites) in northeastern Turkey, in the exact territory the Bible assigns to Ashkenaz, the Japhethite, whose name those same people eventually carried into Germany. Josephus put Ashkenaz’s descendants in the Caucasus and the Anatolian region. Elhaik’s sequencing placed the Ashkenazi source population in the same location. They arrived at the same coordinates by completely different methods, separated by two thousand years.
Just incredible, all of it. The chief argument for 3.8 billion dollars per year, undying American allegiance to an ancient land grant, the persecution and mistreatment of Christians in the Holy Land, the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Gazans, the bombing of priests and churches in Lebanon, the war in Iran fought on their behalf, all of it. Built on a lie.