In February of this year, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, a longtime conservative commentator and former host of a top-ranked cable news program. When Ambassador Huckabee expressed his belief that the Jewish people have a covenantal and historical claim to their ancestral homeland of Israel, Carlson showed hostility, arguing, “The only thing we know about them is they lived in Latvia or Poland—they’re Eastern European…. By what definition [are they Jewish]? How do we know they have any connection to the Jews of the Bible?”¹

Though it may be shocking to learn, this is now one of the most prevalent tactics being employed against the Jewish people: claiming that the Jewish ethnicity disappeared millennia ago, and that modern Jews fabricated their ancient Israelite lineage. By asserting that modern Jews are descended merely from converts of non-Hebrew origin, antisemites are now retroactively eradicating the Jewish people from history, making modern Jews nothing more than fraudulent claimants to the extinct heritage of a divinely rejected nation. In this narrative, the modern Jew is an undercover operative, a deceitful usurper, a foreign invader of Palestine, and a member of the synagogue of Satan²—no home, no heritage, and no history except for a conspiracy of lies.

Historical literacy is the only defense against revisionist history. To that end, this series of articles aims to educate and equip people with the real, well-documented, unbroken history of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present day. Since Jewish history covers more than two millennia of dispersion across the world, the focus will be confined to a condensed overview of the history of Ashkenazi Jews (Jews with ancestors from Eastern Europe), who comprise 70-80% of the global Jewish population.³ Starting with the Israelite population in the Roman Province of Judea, we will trace the Jewish Diaspora (dispersion) to communities in Italy and Southern Europe, which later migrated northward and became established in Germany, before being pushed further northward to Poland and surrounding regions. Finally, we will cover the return of many Ashkenazim to their ancient homeland in Israel, as well as discuss the significance of genetic evidence and other such considerations.

Before examining the events of post-biblical history, it is important first to establish the condition of the Jewish people during the lives of Yeshua and His Emissaries. In the 1st century CE,⁴ there was a significant Jewish population both within the Land of Israel and abroad in the Diaspora. This was the result of the Babylonian Expulsion in 587 BCE, when the Kingdom of Judah had been destroyed and its inhabitants scattered. Though King Cyrus had later allowed Jews to return home and rebuild,⁵ many Jews remained in communities outside of Judah, as attested to in the book of Esther. By the time of the book of Acts, Jews are recorded making pilgrimage to Jerusalem from regions corresponding to modern-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Italy, and Saudi Arabia.⁶ Likewise, Paul was a Jew born in Tarsus (a city in Turkey) who visited numerous cities throughout the Roman Empire proclaiming the Good News of Yeshua, always going first to the cities’ established Jewish communities.⁷

The book of Acts also mentions proselytes (Gentile converts) among the Jewish people, speaking of “the יְהוּדִים, Y’hudiym [Jews] and of the devout proselytes” (Acts 13:43, mjlt), and recording a specific proselyte by name.⁸ Though some historical revisionists claim that such proselytes had converted en masse to the point of displacing ethnic Israelites, “there is no evidence that converts made up any great proportion of the Jewish population,”⁹ or significantly diluted the Jewish ethnicity through intermarriage. In particular, critics focus on the Idumeans (Edomites), whom Josephus records as undergoing a mass conversion to Jewish lifestyle and practice¹⁰ during a period of Judean territorial expansion. Yet the Idumeans’ politically-motivated conversion never resulted in full assimilation with Jews, and they continued to exist as an identifiable group even up to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.¹¹ For both Idumeans specifically and Gentile converts in general, proselytes remained distinguishable within Jewish society,¹² as evidenced by Acts listing “the יְהוּדִים, Y’hudiym” and “the proselytes” separately, rather than referring to proselytes as Jews. Though proselytism to Judaism in the 1st century was notable,¹³ history nevertheless gives little to no indication of widespread, coordinated missionary efforts which persuaded vast numbers of Gentiles to join the Jewish people.¹⁴ Proselytism never swelled to the extent of jeopardizing the ethnic definition of the Jewish people, nor did Gentile converts surreptitiously insert themselves into the nation and co-opt the name “Jew” in untold numbers. On the contrary, the New Covenant Scriptures include full Jewish genealogies tracing back to Abraham,¹⁵ state Jewish individuals’ ancestry from specific tribes (namely Judah, Benjamin, Levi, and Asher),¹⁶ describe Jews as an ethnos (ethnic-group),¹⁷ and confidently assert the Jews’ collective identity as Israelites descended from the patriarchs.¹⁸

Whether in the Diaspora or in Judea, the Jewish people of the 1st century retained a strong, contiguous Israelite heritage. In the next part of this series, we will examine how Jews survived the destruction of Jerusalem and downfall of Judea, and how they lived as exiles in Italy throughout the following centuries.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

1. Tucker Carlson, “Tucker Confronts Mike Huckabee on America’s Toxic Relationship With Israel,” Tucker Carlson Network, YouTube video, February 20, 2026, 1:26:00–1:26:14, youtube.com ↩︎
2. Revelation 3:9 (cf. 2:9) describes the synagogue of Satan as those “who say that they are Jews and are not, but lie” (esv). Though this passage is plainly written not against Jews but against non-Jews who pretend to be Jews, Christians of past centuries have wrongfully labeled Jews as the “Synagogue of Satan” by saying that Jews are not true spiritual Jews because they reject Yeshua. Today’s antisemites use this same epithet against Jews, but many are now doing so with the claim that modern Jews are literally non-Jews who pretend to be Jews. ↩︎
3. “Ashkenazi,” Encyclopædia Britannica; “Who Are Ashkenazi Jews?,” Aish.com.
   It is primarily Ashkenazi history which antisemites attack—oftentimes ignoring the history of other Jewish groups such as Sephardim and Mizrahim—when trying to undermine Zionism and the indigenous ancestry of modern Israeli Jews. Such attacks are disingenuous, especially considering that among Israeli Jews, only ~45% are Ashkenazi (Pew Research Center, “Chapter 1: Identity,” in Israel’s Religiously Divided Society (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, March 8, 2016), pewresearch.org), meaning that attacks on Ashkenazi history have no bearing on the indigeneity of the majority of Israeli Jews. ↩︎
4. For the sake of simplicity and consistency, this series will use modern BCE-CE terminology (rather than BC-AD), because this is the terminology used in most of the scholarly sources which will be referenced. ↩︎
5. Ezra 1. ↩︎
6. Acts 2:5-11. ↩︎
7. Acts 21:39, 17:1-2. ↩︎
8. Acts 2:11, 6:5. ↩︎
9. Martin Goodman, “Jewish Proselytizing in the First Century,” in Judaism in the Roman World: Collected Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 92, archive.org. ↩︎
10. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 13.9.1, trans. William Whiston, uchicago.edu ↩︎
11. William Horbury, W. D. Davies, and John Sturdy, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 3, The Early Roman Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 206. archive.org. ↩︎
12. Goodman, Judaism in the Roman World, 110, archive.org. ↩︎
13. Horbury, Davies, and Sturdy, Cambridge History of Judaism, 3:944, archive.org. ↩︎
14. Goodman, Judaism in the Roman World, 109, archive.org.
    The main evidence which might suggest widespread missionary efforts in Judaism would be Matthew 23:15, where Yeshua condemns the lengths to which the Pharisees and scribes would go to “make one proselyte” and thus “make him a son of גֵּיהִנֹּם, Geihinom twofold more than yourselves.” Yet this does not indicate how significant the results of such efforts were, only that the Pharisees made such efforts with zeal, thereby dooming any proselytes they made. ↩︎
15. Matthew 1:1ff; Luke 3:23ff. ↩︎
16. Hebrews 7:14; Romans 11:1; Acts 4:36, 2:36. ↩︎
17. Luke 7:5, 23:2; John 11:48-52, 18:35; Acts 10:22, 24:10 & 17, 28:19. ↩︎
18. John 8:37; Acts 2:22, 3:12ff, 13:15ff; Romans 9:3-5; 2 Corinthians 11:22. ↩︎