JewsJews (יְהוּדִים, Yehudim, jehuˈdim) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group, nation or ethnos native to the Levant, originating from the ancient Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity, nationhood, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the ethnic religion of the Jewish people, although its observance varies from strict to none. Jews take their origins from a Southern Levantine national and religious group that arose towards the end of the second millennium BCE.
TubalTubal (תֻבָל, Ṯuḇāl), in Genesis 10 (the "Table of Nations"), was the name of a son of Japheth, son of Noah. He is known to be the father of the Caucasian Iberians (ancestors of the Georgians) according to primary sources. Later, Saint Jerome refashioned the Caucasian Iberia (Georgia) into the Iberian Peninsula (Western Europe) and Isidore of Seville consolidated this mistake. Modern scholarship has identified the biblical Tubal with Tabal, an Anatolian state and region mentioned in Assyrian sources.
Generations of NoahThe Generations of Noah, also called the Table of Nations or Origines Gentium, is a genealogy of the sons of Noah, according to the Hebrew Bible (Genesis ), and their dispersion into many lands after the Flood, focusing on the major known societies. The term nations to describe the descendants is a standard English translation of the Hebrew word "goyim", following the 400 CE Latin Vulgate's "nationes", and does not have the same political connotations that the word entails today.
Semitic peopleSemites, Semitic peoples or Semitic cultures is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics. First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen School of History, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem (שֵׁם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites. In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.
Biblical terminology for raceSince early modern times, a number of biblical ethnonyms from the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 have been used as a basis for classifying human racial (cosmetic phenotypes) and national (ethnolinguistic cultural) identities. The connection between Genesis 10 and contemporary ethnic groups began during classical antiquity, when authors such as Josephus, Hippolytus and Jerome analyzed the biblical list.
JaphethJapheth ˈdʒeɪfɛθ (יֶפֶת Yép̄eṯ, in pausa Yā́p̄eṯ; Ἰάφεθ ; Iafeth, Iapheth, Iaphethus, Iapetus) is one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, in which he plays a role in the story of Noah's drunkenness and the curse of Ham, and subsequently in the Table of Nations as the ancestor of the peoples of the Aegean Sea, Anatolia, and elsewhere. In medieval and early modern European tradition he was considered to be the progenitor of the European peoples, while Islamic traditions also include the Chinese people among his descendants.
Tower of BabelThe Tower of Babel (, Mīgdal Bāḇel) narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth and parable meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar (). There they agree to build a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Yahweh, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.
Historical race conceptsThe concept of race as a categorization of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) has an extensive history in Europe and the Americas. The contemporary word race itself is modern; historically it was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries. Race acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology through scientific racism starting in the 19th century. With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete.
Caucasian raceThe Caucasian race (also Caucasoid, Europid, or Europoid) is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. The Caucasian race was historically regarded as a biological taxon which, depending on which of the historical race classifications was being used, usually included ancient and modern populations from all or parts of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.
