THE TRUE HISTORY OF JUDAISM

The Holy Quran states in verse 4 of Surah Al-Isra:

وَقَضَيْنَٓا اِلٰى بَن۪ٓي اِسْرَٓاء۪يلَ فِي الْكِتَابِ لَتُفْسِدُنَّ فِي الْاَرْضِ مَرَّتَيْنِ وَلَتَعْلُنَّ عُلُوًّا كَب۪يرًا

“We revealed to the Children of Israel in the Book: you will certainly spread corruption on earth twice, and you will certainly transgress with great arrogance and boasting.”

The Jewish religion and the history of the Jewish people are presented as firmly established, certain concepts, and historians, with very few exceptions, swallow this account whole. Yet the history of the Jewish people, like the propaganda surrounding the occupation of Palestine today, is built on inconsistencies. Instead of the accepted history, which has become almost an article of faith, the outlines of a history consistent with the evidence, events and the Quran can be set out as follows:

1. After migrating from Iraq, probably at the end of the Sumerian period, Prophet Abraham and his family spread the idea of Islam and the concept of the faith of Abraham. Their histories, that of Prophet Moses, and the revelation of the Torah—the first five books—are true.

2. There was no language called Hebrew distinct from the other Semitic languages. When the Children of Israel came to Canaan/Palestine, they adopted the common Canaanite/Palestinian/Phoenician language, which was almost identical to their own.

3. The Children of Israel adopted the language, culture and trading traditions of Phoenicia, a great maritime empire extending throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. Over time, they abandoned Islam, the law of Prophet Moses. Archaeological excavations uncover idols in their homes from this period.

4. Iraqi rule brought Phoenician dominance in Syria/Palestine to an end. Nebuchadnezzar exiled some of the resisting Children of Israel to Babylon. He left untouched the Samaritans, who still followed the Torah. The Samaritans survive today as a small community.

5. The Children of Israel were freed when the Iranians, who succeeded the Iraqis, established their rule over the entire Near East, Middle East and Central Asia, and even parts of South Asia. Iran chose Aramaic, which could be considered a dialect of Arabic, rather than its own Old Persian, as the common language of the empire.

6. Üzeyir rewrote the Torah and the additional books, this time in Aramaic, the common language of the empire. Nevertheless, apart from among the Samaritans, Islam—the law of the Torah—was not practised in Palestine. At that time, there was worship of Yahweh, also known as the Demiurge, the deity of smithing, and there were abundant idols. Even kings minted coins bearing idols. The Sabbath and the law of Prophet Moses were again abandoned.

7. In Greece, under the influence of Iran, which adhered to Zoroastrianism, one of the corrupted forms of Islam, an intellectual revolution began with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, laying the groundwork for monotheism and questioning idols and old traditions. This found acceptance among the Macedonians, mounted warriors who were the latest migrants to the region. Planning to take the place of a declining Iran, King Philip built a great military force and began his conquests. Upon his death, he was succeeded by his son Alexander, depicted on coins with horns—Dhul-Qarnayn. His tutor Aristotle, later known among Muslims as the First Teacher, also became the intellectual leader of the empire.

8. Alexander and Aristotle, who conquered the world of their day, sought a common religion and a common language to replace Zoroastrianism and Aramaic. For this purpose, a simplified, artificial form of Greek, a very difficult language, was created to suit the new religion that was to emerge. It was called Koine, or common, Greek. As for religion, they took as their basis the monotheistic Semitic religion in Jerusalem, where Alexander reported that he had come through divine inspiration in his dreams. Although the Israeli researcher Yonatan Adler established that the people of Palestine were not following this religion, the law of Prophet Moses, when Alexander arrived in the 4th century BC, the elites and a small number of clergy still preserved remnants of the religion of Moses. Dhul-Qarnayn and the First Teacher gathered and compiled these.

9. To establish a peaceful world in harmony with Allah, governed by reason and possessing a new language, a new religion and a new society, Alexander and Aristotle began founding the new city of Alexandria in Egypt, the financial and cultural centre of the world at that time. They also began establishing its heart: a world university that would be a centre of knowledge and religion, the Library of Alexandria. In Alexandria, they set about recompiling the Torah in its most accurate form, drawing primarily on fragments of revelation, inscriptions and oral traditions held by the Semitic peoples of Palestine. This earliest available Torah, later called the Septuagint, meaning the Seventy, was written in the newly developed common artificial language, Koine Greek. Under the clear influence of Semitic languages, Koine Greek was first used in the Septuagint Torah. It later formed the basis of the language of the Gospels and of Greek, the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ottoman Rum Millet.

10. For centuries, the Septuagint Torah, together with the Psalms and other additional books written in the same language, was the only scripture. There was no Hebrew Torah, no language called Hebrew, and no Aramaic Torah either. The Macedonian states probably did not encourage this either. Much later, the Jewish rabbi Josephus, a historian of the Roman period, sought to explain why the Koine Greek Torah was the only book available. He claimed that from the 12 tribes, 6 translator-rabbis were selected from each, that their simultaneous independent translations were identical, and that, faced with this perfection, the rabbis concluded that they no longer needed the original Hebrew Torah in their possession. This is, of course, a very strained explanation. When Alexander arrived, there was neither a substantial rabbinical institution, nor enough scholars who knew Greek to produce so many translations, nor even Koine Greek itself. Indeed, there was not a single book, treatise, inscription or scrap of information written in Hebrew from that period. Moreover, translations are never identical, and clergy do not eliminate the original text of revelation in their religion. In short, these are later fabrications intended to deny that Dhul-Qarnayn’s project produced the first written Torah.

11. Because Alexander died, completing the Septuagint Torah fell to his right-hand man Ptolemy, who took over both Egypt and this project. The city of Alexandria, the Library of Alexandria as the first university, the common Koine language and the Septuagint Torah were all intended to make the world a place of peace with a uniform faith and a uniform language. It was assumed that the Palestinians of that period would readily adopt this Jewish standard and the Koine language. However, because the main aim was to spread it throughout the world, efforts were also made to spread it among non-Palestinian peoples: the Greeks, Anatolians, Egyptians, Iranians, Indians and Central Asians who were subjects of the empire.

12. Judaism, Koine Greek and the Septuagint Torah were adopted by the elites and the bureaucracy in the Macedonian empires of what is also called the Hellenistic period, particularly by the financial and commercial bureaucracy regarded as the foundation of great empires. A Jew was expected to be proficient not in Aramaic or Greek, but in Koine Greek. He was to read and memorise the Torah, not the Iliad, the Odyssey or local epics. He was to specialise in international trade and finance, not agriculture or soldiering. These Jews, who were to bring peace to the world, could be of Semitic origin, but also included those who adopted the new religion later and had no ethnic connection. It was thought that, thanks to their positions, these pioneering new Jews, this “chosen people” spread throughout the Macedonian world empire, would in time influence and transform the traditional peoples steeped in pagan ignorance, who clung to their own deities and idols and opposed Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

13. Although the imperial religion and language had been determined, after Alexander’s death the Macedonian state was divided into four separate regions among his four army commanders. For a long time, these new states did not fight one another. They respected Alexander’s legacy, used Koine Greek among themselves, developed shared commercial and financial structures, accepted Alexandria and its Library as their cultural centre, and placed no obstacles in the way of Judaism’s development. Although southern Palestine remained under the Ptolemies and the rest under the Seleucids, the new ideology, New Judaism, spread in all four regions, and even to their trading partners in the western Mediterranean, India, China and northern Eurasia. The last remnants of these communities, whose genetic ancestry was entirely local, survive even today.

14. Alexander Dhul-Qarnayn was accepted by all Semitic peoples as holding the rank of a prophet or saint. He was accorded an important place in the Syriac tradition, and although Judaism gradually diminished his importance in its accounts, it related that he worked closely with Jewish rabbis and came to Jerusalem through inspiration. The Holy Quran mentions Dhul-Qarnayn without introducing him because the Arabs knew him well at the time of its revelation. These accounts undoubtedly attest to Alexander’s spiritual role, far beyond that of an ordinary Macedonian or Greek nationalist soldier. Alexander, a follower of Aristotle, and his close companions founded the greatest city of the age to revive Judaism, began building a vast centre of learning there, translated the Torah, and developed a new language solely to accord with it. They undoubtedly played a key role in spreading the religion of monotheism and the concept of the faith of Abraham.

15. Nevertheless, Judaism, a project for world peace through a single religion, a single language and a single society, remained confined to financial elites and the commercial bureaucracy in the Macedonian empires. It did not spread among the conservative polytheistic societies it targeted. Palestine was the exception: the former Jews of Palestine who had drifted into polytheism gradually adopted the law of Prophet Moses in the Koine Greek Torah. But the privileged New Jews were in no hurry to share the pivotal position they had acquired. These New Jews of the ‘Hellenistic period’, drawn from many peoples, spread across the world and already linked by trade, strengthened the bonds of communication and solidarity they had established and developed an “us and them” outlook.

16. The clearest indication of the New Jews’ “us and them” outlook, and of the fact that the new religion would not spread, was riba, or interest. In every corrupted form of Islam, whether Zoroastrianism, Judaism or, later, Christianity, and even in other religions, interest is forbidden because it is a means of exploitation. Charging forbidden interest to outsiders became, over time, the greatest weapon of the newly established Jewish class. It grew like a snowball and today threatens humanity as an avalanche.

17. After surviving for three centuries, the Macedonian states weakened and collapsed one by one, falling into Roman and Iranian hands. The cosmopolitan New Jews, specialists in international trade and finance who spoke Koine Greek as their native language and had by then adopted the law of the Septuagint Torah and its additional books, already held pivotal positions at the centres and crossroads of world trade. They were unaffected because they also met the commercial, financial, cultural and scholarly needs of the new empires. They strengthened their positions by extending interest-bearing loans to rising rulers in Rome, Iran and elsewhere, and by financing wars.

18. The old Jews of Semitic origin in Palestine, who gradually adopted the law of the Septuagint Torah over two hundred years, became integrated in religion, if not in culture, with the New Jews of the imperial financial bureaucracy who adopted this religion later, despite some friction. Unlike the cosmopolitan Jews, Palestinian Jews, who also worked in occupations outside finance, attempted to rise against Rome, embraced nationalism and launched rebellions. Alongside these developments, an effort to create a national language began among Palestinian Jews. Rather than their native Koine Greek, they took as their basis a local clerical dialect mixing Aramaic and Arabic. Three centuries after the Septuagint Torah, the first translations were made into this still-unsettled language.

19. The act of Prophet Jesus that most stirred up the Jews during his lifetime was his attack on the interest-bearing loan offices that had set up stalls in front of the Temple in Jerusalem. By overturning these stalls, Prophet Jesus, himself a Jew, was emphasising that lending at interest was the greatest sin. Jewish leaders saw this as an attack on the foundation of their power, so they took a stand against him and asked the Romans to kill him. Cosmopolitan Jews were, by definition, the section of society engaged in trading money. Judaism and interest-bearing credit had become so intertwined that these transactions were conducted in the Temple, the religion’s holiest place.

20. The translation of the Torah and the Old Testament from Koine Greek into the local language accelerated further through opposition to Prophet Jesus and his message. The native language of Prophet Jesus and his apostles was Koine Greek, and their scripture was the Koine Greek Septuagint Old Testament. The Jewish rabbinical class that did not embrace Christianity produced Masoretic (orthodox) Old Testament texts, which also incorporated influences from the Jewish book of magic, the Kabbalah, to draw a firm dividing line. These later-written, supposedly original texts, which were not in a single consistent language and differed greatly from the Septuagint, removed in particular the Old Testament passages that foretold Prophet Jesus and even mentioned his lineage. The early Christians, meanwhile, continued to use the Septuagint scriptures and Koine Greek, and the Gospel was written in this language on the basis of this book. Besides New Hebrew, Old Testament texts containing more material than the old Septuagint were produced in Aramaic, which was still spoken in the region, and even in Latin. These texts, called Targumim (translations), were influenced by the book of magic, the Kabbalah. They became standardised only over the course of a thousand years.

21. The Jews, who distanced themselves from Christians, continued to be the only group providing financial services during the Roman period and subsequently in medieval Europe. So much so that articles 10 and 11 of Magna Carta, signed between the king and the nobles in England and called the first constitution, regulate debts from interest-bearing loans without referring to banks or moneylenders. They refer only to Jews, treating Judaism as an occupation. In short, although they also practised other occupations, until they entered local societies in the 19th century, Jews around the world were a group identified with finance who remained within their own urban neighbourhoods. Judaism was never entirely a religion, a nation or an occupation. Throughout history, it was a mixture of the three. It remains so today.

22. The Hebrew language also emerged artificially in three leaps. The first was the Hebrew of the Masoretic Old Testament, which began to be written in the 1st century BC from a mixture of local North Arabian Semitic languages and took its final form over two centuries. The second was the emergence in the 13th century of a Hebrew used among rabbis, developed by Maimonides (Musa bin Meymun) with words borrowed from Arabic. The third was New Hebrew, the everyday Zionist language artificially created at the end of the 19th century from Yiddish, a form of German, and other languages by Zionists inspired by the Greek revolt.

To reiterate briefly:

• By Alexander’s time, the majority of the Children of Israel had abandoned the law of Prophet Moses.
• Alexander and Ptolemy compiled the texts of revelation in the Library of Alexandria, which they had newly established.
• The Torah was compiled in the new Koine Greek, suited to Semitic languages, in order to spread it throughout the world.
• The New Jews were the financial bureaucracy of the Alexandria-centred Macedonian empires, recruited from different peoples, converted to the new religion and placed at the empire’s trading posts.
• During this period, both the Jews’ language of worship and their spoken language were Koine Greek. The Dead Sea manuscripts were in Greek, as was the scripture read by Prophet John, Prophet Jesus and his apostles, among others.
• Hebrew is an artificial language created later from Aramaic, Arabic and even Koine Greek patterns, reaching its final form in the 20th century.
• The Jews, the people chosen to spread monotheism, did not share their privileges and used interest as a weapon instead of spreading the revived religion of Prophet Moses to humanity. Popular Judaism, meanwhile, was adopted only in Palestine.
• Later, they strongly opposed Prophet Jesus and the Christians, who sought to abolish interest and thus the distinction between Jew and non-Jew, and to fulfil the Jews’ mission of spreading the religion.
• The rabbis who opposed Christianity falsified the Masoretic Torahs, written under the influence of the Kabbalah and hostility to Prophet Jesus, and ensured that the Koine Greek Torah also disappeared over time.

The Jews, the continuation of the Children of Israel, were elites of different ethnic origins, not only in the Hellenistic period but also in Roman times, the Middle Ages and even up to the 19th century. They were professionals in international trade and finance in all the world’s trading centres, monopolised lending at interest, maintained communication and solidarity even in the world’s most distant regions, and followed the Kabbalah and the Talmud in addition to the Old Testament.

Contrary to widespread beliefs, we will continue this subject as an effort to uncover the principles of a rational Jewish history consistent with the Holy Quran’s accounts of the Jews and Dhul-Qarnayn, the accounts in the altered Torah and Gospel, and historical findings.

Prof. Dr. Kutluk Özgüven

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