Found in jwz's LiveJournal : some guys are trying to research the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, to convince them to convert and to move in Israel.
If you go back to the 140th generation, you have 1393796574908163946345982392040522594123776 grand-parents. The population was then only a few dozen million people on Earth. Statistically, the probability that anyone has an ancestor from the lost tribes is very high. Everyone to Israel! (And they're still disallowing Palestinian immigration.)
"Jewish" refers to descendants of Judah and/or residents of the kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, plus an assortment of others who stayed in the south); thus, when jwz says "in search of lost Jews," he's inaccurate, and when the person claims to be a Jew from the "Bnei Menashe tribe," that's really inaccurate.
Yes, I give Bible class teachers fits. Abraham was not a Jew.
Oh, and it's GNU/Linux, not Linux! (There's a word for people like me.)
Re:Semantics
rafael on 2002-10-15T19:27:12
IIRC, the legal definition of "Jew" in Israel's immigration laws is "someone whose mother is Jew". This kind of recursive definition allows regressio ad infinitum, doesn't it ?
