Talk:Ten Lost Tribes/2004 Archive

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[edit] Lost Ten Tribes, etc.

Hi IZAK. I am trying to fill in gaps with a variety of articles by following a sort of chain reaction. Sometimes this means creating articles and sometimes it means getting entangled with someone else's work along other lines and it looks like you and me are stumbling over each other. First off let me say that I have no beef here, no ax to grind, I am just infusing information. However, it would appear that because of the overlap into your area of interest a certain amount of reverting is occuring. I want to get along with you so rather than me infusing more information perhaps you will correspond with me and let me know how you see that particular article. I didn't want it slanted as "modern theories" because they are not, and because other writers - some are Jews - do not subscribe to the Christian theories and certainly not to the antisemitic versions, I was attempting to create a NPOV all things to all people sort of approach so that everything could get incorporated. But by slanting it as "Christian" or "Jewish" it creates a problem with the style since just about every opinion under the sun is included in these theories. For instance, while Armstrong saw the Jews as brothers with the tribes in the Kingdom of Israel, his take was that the Kingdom of Israel was not Jewish. Horowitz was sympathetic with those views except for the part concerning who the Messiah was. There are several other historical entries that I would like to add to this article but I will hold off until I hear back from you. Correspond with me, I am easy to get along with. (I am signing off for today.) MPLX/MH 06:11, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] IZAK's response

Hi MPLX: Here are some of my initial responses to what you wrote above RE: Lost Ten Tribes.

  • Firstly, there is nothing wrong in dividing subjects into Jewish, Christian, etc as this does NOT go against NPOV. On the contrary, it allows the reader to know where the views they are reading are coming from.
    • A NPOV article does NOT mean that a writer must crunch "all views" and "mush" them into an artficially created "homogenous" article that does NOT reflect reality.
  • Secondly, what individuals may "think" or "theorize" is not always important. That some Jews "think" something does NOT make it into Judaism.
    • Or, the views of Armstrong are really NOT that important to either Judaism or Christianity, as he is not accepted as a mainstream scholar. Judaism for sure is not concerned with his views at all! If as you say "his take was that the Kingdom of Israel was not Jewish", then Armstrong MUST classed as an ignoramus or worse.
    • Horowitz, may be Jewish, but, like Armstrong, he is just a journalist and has no standing in the world of Jewish scholarship.
  • Finally, this subject of the Ten Lost Tribes is NOT just the domain of modern-day Christian evangelists. See the Israelite article for example. It is dealt with in other Wikipedia articles which I have collected and placed at the head of the article Lost Ten Tribes#Jewish historical background. It is a serious topic within the Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and Jewish history as it concerns JEWISH people primarily, and it is that context which must be placed before the reader first and foremost in order for the reader to grasp its context and meaning. I hate saying this, but I think Armstrong was a "pseudo-scholar" and one should not pay any attention to ANY of his (and those like him) views and comments. IZAK 06:41, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • I am in agreement with you on the last part, but the basis for his teachings did not originate with him but with J. H. Allen and others. I also agree with you on the question of scholarship, but I contribute not just to Wikipedia, but I also create written published materials elsewhere on a variety of subjects on two levels: one for academia and one for the general public. This is where I see a different way of looking at things: "perception is reality" (which of course it is not, but since the masses act upon perception as though it is, it in itself creates a totally new reality based upon a perception.)
  • Therefore if you take the Allen/Armstrong view (the Christian Identity movement have the Jews coming from a non-human race that is traced to writings outside of the Bible), then their view is that the peoples in Egyptian captivity who included the peoples known as Hebrews, were not all Jews to begin with, but all Hebrews who included members of the tribe of Judah. Then they follow the split in the two kingdoms which ended up with two capitals and two different religions to the point that the two kingdoms began attacking each other.
  • Since Armstrong wrapped himself up with the modern state of Israel and had tremendous public influence in a variety of ways that were all outside of the norm (he was not trying to gain converts), then it is necessary to look at the reality that Armstrong created out of perception.

Bobby Fischer is one and Michael Dennis Rohan is another. But then there is the case of Dr. Ernest Martin and Professor Benjamin Mazar and the idea that the location of the Temple has been misidentified. But there are many, many more such examples.

  • As I stated earlier, I am following a thread in my contributions and if you notice I contributed heavily to the rewriting of the pirate radio articles because without Armstrong, British pirate radio of the 1960s would never have taken off. So if that did not happen then would the "British Invasion" of the US charts have taken off if there was no home grown music outlet? Notice also my backtrack to Magna Carta and the fact that while you have been documenting Jewish history in England, the other lot (British) had been ignoring Jewish history in England until I stuck my oar in the water. What I was trying to do in badgering you before about Magna Carta was to join up the dots (so to speak) and therefore arrive at a balanced view of history. This is what I am trying to do with music and with Armstrong and the turmoil over the Temple Mount. I would like to see balanced articles, not just Jewish articles or anyone else's articles, just a factoring in of all accounts to present a realistic overview from all sides.
  • Unlike the Christian Identity movement that is pro-Nazi, Armstrong was very anti-Nazi and even anti-German and certainly anti-United States of Europe. There is good reason to believe that in the 1960s Armstrong began to receive US covert funds to push a polemical view on behalf of US foreign policy. I can cite many examples of this. The key seems to be Stanley Rader who was a Jew and an attorney (he is also now deceased) and it was Rader who took Armstrongism from an offshoot religion into becoming a media giant. (His broadcasting activities were more than double that of any other religious organizaton at his peak.)
  • Repeating myself, I am easy to get along with because I have no axe to grind. I ran into a lot of hot air over on the "Sealand" topic which is dominated by people who believe in fantasy and so I gave up rather than fight them. Therefore if you would like to suggest what you would like me to do, or not do I am willing to listen and because Jimbo actually owns Wikipedia it is not my property anyway (I have interests elsewhere), you won't get into any nasty fights with me. Promise. MPLX/MH 19:50, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Jmabel's response

I certainly agree with IZAK that, after an intro, we should start with the Old Testament origins of the belief that there are ten lost tribes of Israel. After that, many different views should be presented, probably in each case with citations both from advocates of the position and of debunkers. In any case, I think it is important to keep the different genealogies of this idea distinct.

There seems currently to be an overemphasis here on certain western and often anti-Semitic claimants to the "lost tribes" mantle. A lot of peoples (for example, the Pashtun) have legends claiming them to be a lost tribe of Israel. I would hope that by the time the dust settles, all of these theories are listed here. Frankly, I find them mostly either dismissible or pernicious (pernicious in the case of those that wish to claim that present-day Jews are unrelated to the Israelites), but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be documented.

Armstrong is an interesting character: I used to listen to some of his "Plain Truth" radio programs as a teenager (he bought time on my favorite Top 40 station; I thought he was wacko, but I was intrigued just enough not to turn the dial). Yes, the Horowitz/Armstrong line should be documented, but it shouldn't have any special priority here. If everybody plays nice, this could become a very interesting article. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:37, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Question about Jewishness of Lost Ten Tribes

I have a question for both Jmabel and IZAK which relates to the actual opening description of this article and here it is:

  • Is it NPOV and factually correct to state emphatically that the Kingdom of Israel was Jewish?
The reason I ask is because if you follow Jewish religious texts (I have a number in my own library) and then compare them with secular non-religious academic texts (I have a number in my own library), then you end up with two different accounts.
From the academic standpoint the Hebrews were a part of a sub-group of the Hykos in Egypt which eventually gained control of that country. The people who left Egypt and ended up in the area that was historically called Palestine (sans political or religious interpretations), then they composed a lot of different peoples. If we take the religious interpretation that the entire Hebrew story devolved into one man who was renamed Israel and that Israel had several sons of which Judah was but one and if we follow further the saga of the creation of a united theocracy which devolves to Samuel who is superseded by two kings (Saul and then David) and they in turn are superseded by civil war resulting in the establishment of two separate and hostile kingdoms, each with its own capital and eventually each with own religion and if we follow that further to the destruction of the larger kingdom which retained the original name of Israel but whose capital was not Jerusalem, to be followed much later by the destruction of the smaller kingdom known as Judah and which incorporated at best only three of the tribes formed from the sons of the person renamed Israel (aka Jacob); then how can the article begin by stating that the Kingdom of Israel was "Jewish" if we are talking not about the united Hebrew kingdom under Saul and David?
I lay all of this out because it is this very definition that is POV. The Jewish take is as has been expressed by IZAK; the academic version is a Hykos/Hebrew division; the British-Empire version was another (Armstrong, etc.) and the anti-semetic Christian Identity (neo-Nazi, Timothy McVeigh, etc.) is yet another version with sinister overtones.
What I would like to see (which is why I originally constructed the article around a disambiguaton page), is a NPOV version and I think that the present structure prevents that from being stated because at the outset it establishes one view and one view alone and it discards academia but rests upon a religious foundation.
I know that this could become a hot and controversial question, but I am asking it in the spirit of cooperation, NPOV and friendship which Jmabel alluded to and I would like to read responses along the same lines. MPLX/MH 20:11, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
For starters, I would hope we can agree that the British-Empire and Christian Identity views should be described but should clearly be presented as marginal, generally disparaged views with little or no basis either in scholarship or in ancient tradition. These should be treated with reasonable respect, but certainly be given no more credence on a literal level than, for example, the black supremacy doctrines of the Nation of Islam.
I would certainly accord the Old Testament a higher level of respect, while still being clear that we are describing a Biblical account, not an historical truth.
You present as "the academic standpoint" one of several competing views of the possible history of the region in the period. Here is where it is going to get tricky: there are a lot of competing views on many details of the history of that time and place. I would agree that for the period of Saul and David the Old Testament should not be accepted as reflecting actual history in any detail; I think almost all serous scholars now agree that it is, at least in part, legend. However, I really suggest that the article on the Lost Ten Tribes is not the place to try to establish consensus on how to present the conflicting models of this history. This is not a prominent enough topic, and it's one that tends to attract cranks. This needs to be worked out at History of ancient Israel and Judah, which at the moment probably takes the Old Testament and Jewish tradition too much at face value, and could use an influx of modern archeological and other historical research. Trying at this time to integrate that material here, beyond a carefully cited paragraph or three, is probably putting the cart before the horse. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:59, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)
As Jmabel points out, what you describe as "the academic standpoint" is a vast oversimplification of the actual academic standpoint, which consists of many different views on the origins of the Israelites. In fact, I would suggest that the view that the Israelites are a Hyksos (not "Hykos") offshoot is currently a minority position. Rather than making broad claims about "the academic standpoint", it would make more sense to quote prominent academics and present their views. Jayjg | (Talk) 13:07, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Many secular scholars, and then those people who follow them blindly, make the profound error of denigrating and relegating the Hebrew Bible, i.e. the Torah and Tanakh to "myths" and "legends" and instead look to what a bunch of Marxist-educated academic talking-heads have to say on the subject. They all overlook one important fact, that the text of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh is THE key Primary source that is both accurate and has been faithfully preserved for about three thousand years. The Hebrew Bible does not gloss over the failures of the Jewish people and its leaders and yet the Jews have traditionally valued it as the "Book of Books" for the truth it contains. The modern-day archaeologists look for a piece of pottery or an inscription on a cave wall and get excited with their pathetic "discoveries", whereas the classic scholars and bearers of the tradition of true Jewish Torah scholarship have carefully preserved a detailed and durable record of those times without injecting their own latter-day POVs. So let's not knock the records of the Hebrew Bible-Tanakh and those who know how to make sense of it. Indeed, classically, Christianity has accepted the same records. Finally, a lot of the voices coming out of academia are those of POV of self-avowed athiests and agnostics who simply hate religion and anything that may be associated with what they deem to be a God they don't like or dismiss as "myth". IZAK 08:49, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If one were to accept either the historical point of view, or the one of the tanakh, you might come to the conclusion that there is no one Jewish. Despite a fairly common occurance of deviation from Jewish beliefs, they were a Jewish people. Even when civil war occured, they all shared the same God, but their quarrl wasn't concerning religious matters. The entire population of citizens was considered to be Jews. The populations consider themselves to be Jews. For example, the Ethiopian Jews which are an affirmed lost tribe and, even though their practices are suspect, they still have a basic belief in the Jewish system and it's God. SF2K1 01:16, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Thus we take this as our prime example: Is an ethiopian Jew (a member of a lost tribe) Jewish? It depends on who you ask. Historians say they are, rabbis say they are not. The assumption is that when the ten tribes were exiled, they were Jewish. The idea is that they will return with the arrival of the Moshiach. A need to return could infer that they are not Jewish any longer, but are able to recover their lost Jewishness, but what you ask is "can we NPOV state that the former kingdom of Israel was Jewish" and I say that we can, because they were Jewish when they started, and never officially switched to anything else. SF2K1 01:15, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
It's exactly the opposite regarding Ethiopian Jews; historians say they are not a lost tribe, or even from the tribe of Judah, whereas Rabbis have ruled that they are from the tribe of Dan. Jayjg | (Talk) 01:26, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Come on fellas and let's not read in to my comments something about atheism or anything else. I admit to a misspelling and I will probably make more, but let's stick to the point here. Now SF2K1 made the claim above that: "Even when civil war occured, they all shared the same God, but their quarrl wasn't concerning religious matters. The entire population of citizens was considered to be Jews." This statement I think gets to the core of what I am asking. I am not sure that what SF2K1 has stated is true at all. The facts seem to point to two temples and even two religions. Now if we factor in the idea that the reason why the word Jew came into being, it is because only the Kingdom of Judah survived and both its name and prominent tribe referred to Judah = Jew. So then what about the other tribes? Obviously the others banded together with Judah became tagged as "Jewish" even though they represented more than the tribe of Judah. But Israel did not include the tribe of Judah after the split in the two kingdoms. There were a whole lot more tribes than those in the Kingdom of Judah. So to begin by skewing the topic to one side and removing this central issue from discussion is plain wrong. Let me put it this way: If the situation was as described by SF2K1 then there would never have been any lost tribes ... just some lost Jews! More than this no one could have ever invented all of the competing and hostile theories (hostile to each other), if all that was under discussion was lost Jews. That issue was the one taken up by Arthur Koestler and his book The Thirteenth Tribe which is not what we are discussing on this page at the moment. MPLX/MH 02:35, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi MPLX: As for Koestler, if you read his bio you see that he was a self-avowed Communist, and hence an athiest, which makes him into a clear POV "self-hating Jew".

I interject on this: the rhetoric of claiming that those of us Jews who do not share your religious beliefs are "self-hating" should have no place here. I don't hold any brief for Koestler in this respect — he might well have been a self-hating person judging by some of his writings (I can elaborate if needed, but I think it is off-topic) — but being an athiest is not evidence of hating oneself. I'm an atheist by belief, and a Jew by ethnicity, and I am quite attached to both, thank you, and in no way self-hating. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:13, Dec 31, 2004 (UTC)
Jmabel:No need for "confessionals" at all, your Wikipedia credentials are excellent. You yourself say that you can prove that Koestler was self-hating, so I do not understand your objection at all. After all we are discussing a well-known fantasy-author like Koestler and not our own personal beliefs here. But being an "athiest" means that by definition one has a serious POV when it comes to anything related to the religious texts of Judaism. And it is ONLY from those texts that we have any shred of understanding as to what the in heaven's name "Ten Lost Tribes" are at all. IZAK 08:19, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

He is not taken seriously by anyone in the worlds of either academic or (Jewish) religious scholarship at all. I think that you have NOT grasped what SF2K1 is trying to say. I do not think he is using the word "Jew" or "Jewish" in the narrow sense of that word's technical derivation from the the tribe or Kingdom of Judah, because in fact Judaism predates the Kingdom of Judah (as odd as it sounds to the ear, it is yet nevertheless very TRUE!) From an absolute Judaic, and often from an academic, perspective one uses the word "Jewish" to describe those specific people who at one time or another believed in what is termed Ethical Monotheism the belief in the ONE and ONLY God of the Jewish people who existed prior to the actual historical "Kingdoms of Israel and Judah" AND who subscribed to the core teachings that were eventually codified in the Torah and with whom God made several binding eternal non-transferable Covenants. Thus Abraham the Hebrew is in fact the FIRST (male) FULL Jew, his son Isaac is the SECOND (Male) FULL Jew, and Jacob is the THIRD (male) FULL Jew. (God makes covenants with each of them at various points in the Book of Genesis.) Then it is Jacob's sons the Twelve Tribes who are FULL Jews followed by their full families the 70 souls mentioned in the Book of Exodus 1:5 "The [original] number of Jacob's direct descendants, including Joseph who was in Egypt, was seventy" [1]. They then multiplied to become the more than 600,000 MALE Children of Israel and their immediate families who are regarded and called "Jews" by Judaism and by many scholars. (God makes several covenants with them too that are viewed as the "glue" that binds the Jews to God forever.) The point here is that the way we use the label "Jews" today functions on a few levels: It is historical, practical for the present, and RETROACTIVE because it is not a "linear notion" that is somehow only "valid" from the time the Kingdom of Judah "rises and falls". On the contrary, that entity of people we call "Jews" today have existed from the times of Abraham the FIRST Jew onwards, and that therefore, according to this line of reasoning, INCLUDES the Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and it is what gives the Lost Ten Tibes their start as Jews and it is also the key connection and commonality that is sought out when trying to determine the validity of any claims by "lost" ethnic groups to be either "Jews" or Jews or THE Jews because they "came from" the original Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Finally, you cannot avoid the "religious" nature of this subject no matter how you look at it because it is from the Hebrew Bible, the core of both Judaism and Christianity, that primary axiomatic information about the Kingdom of Israel and its original Ten Tribes who were the descendants of Jacob's (who was renamed "Israel") Twelve Sons is derived and everything that follows MUST be measured in the light of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh being the only reliable key Primary source historically and religiously. All else is pure conjecture at best and fallacy at worst. There is no escaping this. IZAK 03:33, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Interjecting again: I agree with most of the above, until you hit the passage "measured in the light of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh..." While I have no problem with people basing their religious beliefs in the Bible, it is not a work of historical scholarship. There is no good reason to believe, for example, that Abraham is an actual historical figure. The closer one gets to the period in which the Bible was being written the more it can be trusted as an historical document.
I honestly don't know whether historians have any solid data on the Ten Lost Tribes independent of the Bible. I do know, however, that they have a lot of independent information -- archeological digs, inscriptions -- on the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, and enough to know that the Biblical historical accounts should not all be accepted at face value. They are useful, and for some things they're the best we've got, but one should not confuse a work of religion with a work of history. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:24, Dec 31, 2004 (UTC)

Jmabel: You cannot say, as you do that "the Bible, it is not a work of historical scholarship" as that is just a matter of POV of secular athiest scholars mostly. For billions of believers, the Hebrew Bible is a both a supremely reliable book of facts, which of course needs to be understood correctly, and not denigrated by people who don't have a clue about what Judaism is all about (--again, I am not talking about you, I am talking about secular scholars who enjoy "pontificating" about subjects they know zero about.) Judaism does NOT differentiate between "religion" and "history" at all, as that is a secular concept. And it is the classic text of Judaism which teaches what the Ten Lost Tribes meant and what their "fate" was about. IZAK 08:19, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Nunc pro tunc

As far as Koestler is concerned he is by no means a nobody in terms of standing. He wrote many books on a variety of subjects of which The Thirteenth Tribe was but one of them.
On the main topic: What you are describing in legal terminology is Nunc Pro Tunc ("Now for then") which I personally find to be a wretched theory that distorts truth and I do have a personal ax to grind on this score - twice over! (Absolutely nothing to do with Jews, by the way.) This is a theory in law that can remove corporate documents and slip in others in an Orwellian (I am a BIG fan of Orwell), fashion. I suffered as a result of that from a monetary and business point of view. But then I also suffered when my daughter who vanished from my view only to end up murdered, who was adopted by a highly unethical process in law so that her original birth certificate which I have was removed from the legal registry and the other one slipped into its place. A man who later turned out to be a child abuser of my daughter (not her murderer), then was stated in legal records to live where I lived and be married to the person that I married and be the father of the child that I helped to bring into this world. I was there at the very instant of her delivery.
Now if you apply what I have just written to what you have just written you can see that I hold that practice to be very, very evil indeed. I abhor Nunc Pro Tunc. Yes it is legal and yes it is practiced in corporation law and in adoption law and now I see that it is practiced by religion! I detest it because it is Big Brother Orwellian nonsense for which I can hear Winston crying out from the pages of Nineteen-Eighty-Four - "but you can't stop me from remembering" to which I hear the Nunc pro tunc theorists retort: "wanna bet?" MPLX/MH 03:51, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • MPLX: I must ask at this point that you stop inserting your VERY personal life-history and clear POV statements about how tragic events in your life somehow have anything to do with what we are talking about. Please respect BOTH what happened to your personally and the serious historical and religious issues under discussion by not confusing them and placing us in very uncomfortbale positions when you divulge highly sensitive personal information (which no Wikipedia User should ever do!) Please remove the comments about the personal tragedy you have inserted and return to a less charged fashion of discussing these topics (which are not "evil" or anything else you may call them.) Thank you! IZAK 08:19, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
While the situation you describe IS disturbing, it is hardly relevent or what is going on here. Ethnically, the lost tribes would therefore be Jews. At the time of their exile, they were Jewish in the full meaning of the word. There is very little (if any at all) unquestionable evidence pointing to the opposite. You say that calling them Jews is some kind of Nunc Pro Tunc switch, but this is hardly changing anything to call them Jews. When anyone says Jew, the meaning is actually Israelite (and thus Jewish is "Israelish"). The terms are interchangable at this point in time because it refers to any decendant of Abraham following the code of Moses, which it's meaning may or may not have come because the only practicioners of the ancient Israelite religion were Israelites of Judah while most of the lost tribes lost their affiliation. Due to the nature of the two kingdoms, however, neither of them abandoned their claim to either of the above during the split of kingdoms, just an inheiratence dispute. They are, therefore, still Jewish/Israelites. SF2K1
"Disturbing?" It is Orwellian nonsense. Now for then is a practice that has harmed me personally and many, many others. With regards to its application here: How can something exist before it existed? That is what is being claimed and that is the reason for all of these theories - some harmless and some like the McVeigh version extremely harmful. How can you debunk a neo-Nazi by sweeping aside their claims as nonsense instead of showing why they are nonsense? How can you do that if the premise of rebutal is based upon deceit? How can "Jewishness" exist before Jewishness came into being? How can it be claimed that the divided halves of the once united Hebrew nation were identical? If they were identical then why would they have divided into two different kingdoms and then stay divided and go to war against each other with each one having its own allies with other nations? How could there be two capitals with Jersusalem being only one of them? They eventually had two different religions which made the relations between the two kingdoms even worse. It was this last part that caused the losing of identity in the first place. So how could they be the same? To say otherwise is to revise history by denial. Hello, isn't that a practice that everyone agrees is diabolical? MPLX/MH 16:04, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
So, according to your logic, had the civil war of america been a successful seccession for the south, they would have eventually abandoned the democratic process and the christian religion? Why? Because those were originally a product of the north? Sorry but that doesn't make sense. Would the northern blacks have changed their skin color because the southern slaves had the same skin? Again, no. But guess what, when the confederate states of america were in existance they had a SEPERATE capital miles from the capital of the US, a SEPERATE president, and even *gasp* SEPERATE places of worship! They even considered themselves (and some still do) to be Confederates of the confederation and NOT Americans, regardless that America STILL regarded them as Americans! It was the exact same situation! Or is it that civil war doesn't affect America to the same magical degree as the dispute between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah? SF2K1
I put in the new edit break because this section was getting rather long and difficult to follow. Anyway, back to the question at hand:
First of all I am not discussing logic but a practice known in law as Nunc pro tunc which was a major feature of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. This is not about legality either, because Nunc pro tunc is a legal device. I find it to be unethical and destructive to academic research. Why I find it unethical I have previously explained, why I find it destructive I will explain in answer to your points:
First of all your comparison with the USA and CSA is back to front. The Kingdom of Judah would have been the CSA since it left the Kingdom of Israel. Point one: no "Jewishness" issue, only an "Israelitish" issue. But in the case of the Kingdom of Israel it was the "USA" that vanished leaving the "CSA" or Kingdom of Judah to stand alone!
Second, the "USA" switched to a pagan religion and it created a different temple of its own. This would be like the CSA Protestants continuing while the USA became worshippers of "X" (I wrote that because I could not think of an illustration which would not cause offence.)
When Israel was conquered its conqueror changed its territory name to Samaria which is still used today by present day Israel which got its name quite by accident and much to the dismay of many rabbis of the day. Israel in 1948 was supposed to refer to the land and not a state. So today it would be very confusing for modern Israel to talk about Judea and Israel instead of Judea and Samaria - even though that name came from the pagan conqueror.
Therefore to refer to that ancient Kingdom of Israel as being populated by Jews is not only factually incorrect and historically incorrect, but it is also highly unethical to flim-flam a story which is untrue, all in the name of religion. Obviously this article indicates that a lot of people - including Jews - have over the centuries disagreed with the interpretation of retroactively calling everyone in the Kingdom of Israel a Jew, nunc pro tunc, when they were NEVER Jews to begin with! MPLX/MH 04:11, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
So much for my earlier assumption that you were acting in good faith and had no hidden agenda. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:46, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)
Please explain your last remark. MPLX/MH 16:17, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
If I correctly follow your sometimes confusing remarks, it begins to appear that this is apparently not about the Lost Ten Tribes, it is about your views on who is and is not a Jew. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:06, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)
You do not follow me correctly. I have attempted to do my best to be polite and to address issues. Is it necessary to infer motive when I have in your opinion - longwindedly gone to great lengths to show my neutrality? If you will backtrack you will notice that the "red flag" was revisionist history, which to my mind is somewhat of an oxymoron for anyone who is writing about issues such as this to be interjecting into the mix. It may not be called revisionist or nunc pro tunc by the persons injecting it into the flow, but that is obviously what it is. I strongly objected on two other grounds having nothing whatsoever to do with Jews or this article and if you will reread my remarks above, you will see that this is true. I refuted your points and then the discussion veered off course. Can we just draw a line under this and get on with the discussion? Please? Very politely (and with a degree of humor in order to show friendship and not antagonism.) I will draw an actual line below this and let you go first. MPLX/MH 22:17, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Excellent!

Jmabel I can let out a sigh of relief to know that this is indeed going to be civil, friendly, interesting and hopefully something that everyone can gain something from in a positive spirit. So in that framework let me address your own response with regards to comparing the "British-Empire and Christian Identity views" with those of "the black supremacy doctrines of the Nation of Islam".

I am in overall agreement with your statement. I am also in agreement with your second statement according "the Old Testament a higher level of respect, while still being clear that we are describing a Biblical account, not an historical truth."

I also agree with your statements concerning Saul and David, etc.

With all of that out of the way I would like to focus on your final observations in review:

  • I really suggest that the article on the Lost Ten Tribes is not the place to try to establish consensus on how to present the conflicting models of this history. This is not a prominent enough topic, and it's one that tends to attract cranks. This needs to be worked out at History of ancient Israel and Judah, which at the moment probably takes the Old Testament and Jewish tradition too much at face value, and could use an influx of modern archeological and other historical research. Trying at this time to integrate that material here, beyond a carefully cited paragraph or three, is probably putting the cart before the horse.

What I attempted to do was to present a disambiguation to show what was perceived to be true about this one topic without trying to state dogmatically what was true. I wanted to show the different views and their history (not the history of the lost ten tribes. The reason I wanted to do this is because before I came along someone had already created an "Anglo-Israel" and "British-Israel" reference which were factually inaccurate. So I turned the British-Israel into the beginning of an article about that movement and tried to separate it from the more general "Anglo-Israel" topic. But then other general material was tacked on to muddy it up. I also created the "Christian-Identity" article to dump the neo-Nazi sagas into one place. This left the ambiguous "Anglo-Israel" article as a sort of rival orphan to this article which serves as the replacement for the disambiguation page and in my opinion it really does not work because IZAK wanted to hit the subject on the head as being a trouble-making source for cranks and so he added all of the stuff relating to the History of ancient Israel and Judah, which of course brings us to this moment in time.

Now while we may agree that the subject is all that IZAK fears that it is and he is undoubtedly correct, he cannot address that troublesome thing that "percepetion is reality" (and I am the first to shout that it is not and that reality is reality.) But perception creates an operating reality in the minds of everyone who believes in the fantasy of the Lost Ten Tribes. This means that IZAK is up against the millions of dollars spent by Armstrong and all of the other competing groups who have propagandized their perceptions and there is no way that IZAK can compete. But by ignoring the fact that many people hold these views and treating them as if the views exist (not the reality), then we are in danger of creating a censored and slanted Wikipedia article which no neo-Nazi will ever read.

  • MPLX:Wikipedia is not the place or forum to do "outreach" to the Neo-Nazi movement. Do you really think they care about what anyone outside of their circles writes? This is sounding more bizarre by the hour. IZAK 10:49, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

So what's wrong with a defacto banning of neo-Nazi readers? Well, to my mind the only way to educate someone is first to get their attention and then to expose them to alternative views. Burning books is what neo-Nazi's want to do. It is also what the right-wing Christians did with Bealtle records. Burning knowledge is pig-headed because its next move is to physical violence. So my view is treat with respect views which may awful in an attempt to link the reader into broadening their mind so that they conclude that they do not know everything that there is to know about the subject. I have only referenced neo-Nazis. But the Armstrong lot hate neo-Nazis as much as Jews. Then there are all of the Empire loyalists who are all pro-monarchy and believe that the British Empire really was a divine creation.

I hope that I have been able to express my concerns and my interests with a view to improving on this and the related articles. A template such as the one that IZAk recently created would be great for this topic and all of its step-children. MPLX/MH 22:20, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm honestly confused by some of what you've written: it seems very scattershot. However, as far as I can tell, none of it changes my main point: History of ancient Israel and Judah is currently biased toward a Biblical account, it probably needs sorting out, and it's the article with the breadth to allow this to be sorted out cleanly. This Ten Lost Tribes article is inherently narrow in focus, and is not the place to try to sort out the history of Israel and Judah. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:36, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)
In a nutshell I agreed above (point by point) with 98% of what you previously stated. In addition I also agree with your last comment about the history aspects and the narrowness aspects.
Where I find a problem is that instead of keeping this narrow via a disambiguation article to let these various competing ideas stake their own claims within their own articles, this article is becoming confusing by scrapping the disambiguation page and adding the blanket statement that this topic (about the competing theories) is tied to Jewish history and all of the baggage that religion and history can get into.
I want to keep it simple and separate out these various claims by redirecting the theories to the articles to which they belong so that like closets the stuff can be piled in and the doors can be shut. So the neo-Nazis are in one closet; Armstrong, etc., is another and the British Empire lot are in another - none of which involves trying to duplicate the History of ancient Israel and Judah article. (Each of the articles could be NPOV since links to a variety of existing articles could balance them (including the neo-Nazi theory, for instance.)
I think that a new template that links the theories and lists the History of ancient Israel and Judah in the template would be a good idea. IZAK already came up with a good template for other purposes and maybe he could make one for this topic.
  • I am NOT anxious to start with a wave of "mass-templates" to paper-over gaping holes between diverse fields of scholarship and the like. Let's just see where this present discussion takes us first. IZAK 07:51, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I agree with everything that you have stated except that I can see this article becoming a cluttered mess because it is getting into religion and history. All of that could be avoided by a good disamiguation page with a template on it and on each one of its related pages. MPLX/MH 23:49, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'd like to see this article be a little more than a disambiguation, though it would be fine if it's a series of single-paragraph section each starting with a cross-reference to a main article.
From what I'm seeing here, everyone seems well-intentioned. I'm probably going to take a step back at this point: it doesn't look like there are any deep disagreements and I'm guessing you and IZAK can carry this forward. Let me know if I'm needed. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:38, Dec 30, 2004 (UTC)
I think this article should focus more narrowly on competing views of fate of the Lost Ten Tribes, rather than their origins. As Jmabel points out, the origins of the tribes should be dealt with in the History of ancient Israel and Judah; this article is about the Lost Ten Tribes, which indicates that the subject matter will be restricted to post Assyrian conquest material. Jayjg | (Talk) 13:11, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I am also in agreement with the views expressed by Jayjg but since there are only theories and no undisputed facts concerning the fate of Israel and Judah (glad you made the distinction), then this should be a jumping off article to all of the different and individual theories - which is why I also think that a new template by IZAK would help matters considerably while removing the heavy preamble. MPLX/MH 16:51, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
There are commonly accepted and well documented views of the fate of Judah (along with some far-fetched agenda-based crackpot theories); it is only the fate of Israel which is unclear. Jayjg | (Talk) 17:43, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Jayjg I agree with you again, although Arthur Koestler had another idea and so do the neo-Nazis. But as for me I am on the same page as you. MPLX/MH 21:30, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Though he is a favorite in some unsavory circles, Koestler's work (most of it speculative and derivative) has been thoroughly debunked by actual experts in the area. Jayjg | (Talk) 02:44, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I am not defending the man or his theory. However, his theory is about lost Jews and this article is about lost tribes of Israel, but it would appear from comments made above by others, that some want blur lost Jews with lost Israelites and if it was that simple then there would be no controversy and hence no article! MPLX/MH 02:49, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Well, I see a definite distinction between the two; certainly for the purposes of this article. Jayjg | (Talk) 03:50, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)