Quote:
Originally Posted by StewTradheir
Do you have any opinions on the following claims?:
The Celto Anglo Saxon peoples are the Hebrews The British throne descends from David.
The German people descend from Ancient Assyria
The Babylonian peoples became the Romans
Yes, they are unequivocally false.
Hebrews and their language are Semitic; Anglo-Saxons and Celts (two very different peoples) are Indo-European. There is littleto no similarity between their language, architecture, or literature that would suggest a common heritage. Furthermore, there are well-established Celtic sites that predate any of the major Hebrew migrations out of the Mediterranean coast area.
German and Assyrian people are both Indo-European, but there is nothing to suggest that Assyrians ever settled as far as Germany, and again, there are few to any linguistic or archaeological traces that might tie the two.
The Babylonian-Roman connection is even more suspect, since we have well-established chronologies for peoples. The people who became Romans were pastoralists and proto-horticulturalists when the Babylonians were a mighty power in the Near East.
Most of these theories fall under the basic rubric of an ideology called
British Israelism, and were not developed in detail until the 19th century. They were particularly popular at a high tide of racial theory, phrenology, and antisemitism in Western Europe. In part, it stems from a desire to tie current (and rather artificial) nationalities to several Old Testament events and by extension to what some consider prophecies about the future. Michael Barkun, Paul Boyer, and to some extent Bernard McGinn have books or essays on the subject.