Unearthing the Truth: Genetics, Archaeology, and the Palestinian Descent from Ancient Judeans

The Myth of the Roman Expulsion

The foundation of the Zionist “return” narrative rests on a specific historical claim: that the Roman Empire expelled the Jewish people en masse from Judea following the revolts of 70 CE and 135 CE, leaving the land empty for two millennia.

However, Gómez Julián points out that modern historiography—including the work of Israeli historians like Seth Schwartz, Martin Goodman, and Shlomo Sand—has thoroughly dismantled this myth. Following the revolts, the Romans destroyed Jewish institutions (the Temple, the priesthood, and the Sanhedrin) and banned Jews from entering Jerusalem. Still, there is no historical or archaeological evidence of a mass deportation of the general population.

The rural Judean population remained in situ (in place). Over the next millennium, these communities gradually converted to Christianity during the Byzantine period, and later to Islam following the Arab conquest. They changed their religion and their language, but they never left their soil. Astonishingly, early Zionists like David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi explicitly acknowledged the Jewish ancestry of the Palestinian fellahin (peasants) in writings published between 1905 and 1929, before the political realities of the 1920s forced a strategic ideological shift.

Archaeology: The Canaanite Roots of Israel

To understand the population of ancient Judea, we must look at its origins. The traditional biblical narrative of an Exodus from Egypt and a military conquest of Canaan lacks archaeological support. Instead, the “minimalist school” of biblical archaeology—featuring scholars like Israel Finkelstein, Thomas L. Thompson, and William Dever—has established that the earliest Israelites were actually autochthonous Canaanites.

Around 1200 BCE, approximately 250 small, unwalled villages emerged in the central highlands of Palestine. The pottery, architecture, and lack of destruction layers show continuous cultural evolution from the Late Bronze Age Canaanite substrate. The ancient Israelites did not invade from the outside; they emerged from within the local population.

The Genetic Evidence: Whose DNA Matches the Land?

Perhaps the most compelling section of Gómez Julián’s monograph relies on paleogenomics—the study of ancient DNA. If the biblical exile and return narrative were true, modern Jews would share the closest genetic profile with the ancient Levantine populations. The data, however, tells a different story.

While the author notes with epistemic honesty that Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews retain Levantine ancestry comparable to Palestinians, the overall genomic data refutes the idea that modern Ashkenazi Jews are the exclusive, pure-blooded heirs of ancient Judea.

Language and Toponymy: The Archive of the Land

Genetics tells only part of the story; language tells the rest. The linguistic trajectory of the southern Levant—Canaanite → Hebrew → Aramaic → Arabic—demonstrates language shifts without population replacement. Just as the Irish adopted English without being replaced by the English, the native Levantine population adopted Aramaic, and later Arabic, under successive empires.

Furthermore, the toponymy (place names) of Palestine serves as an unbroken archive of continuity. Palestinian villages retained ancient Hebrew and Canaanite names for millennia. Beit Lahm (Bethlehem), Beisan (Beth-shean), and Bir as-Saba (Be’er Sheva) are not Arab impostures; they are the living pronunciations of the land’s ancient names by the people who never left it. Even Palestinian agricultural customs retained pre-Islamic terms, such as calling rain-dependent farmland ard ba’liyyeh (“land of Baal”), unknowingly invoking the ancient Canaanite storm deity.

The Diaspora as a Mosaic of Conversions

If the Romans didn’t expel millions of Jews, how did the Jewish diaspora spread across three continents? Gómez Julián argues that Judaism transformed from a geographic ethnicity into an expansive religion. In the mid-second century BCE, the Hasmonean dynasty began forcing conversions on neighboring Idumeans and Itureans.

During the Greco-Roman period, Judaism was an active proselytizing religion. The Jewish population exploded from an estimated 150,000 in the 6th century BCE to between 4 and 8 million by the 1st century CE. This demographic explosion is mathematically impossible through natural birth alone. From the Himyarite kingdom in Yemen to the Berber tribes of North Africa, and later the Khazars and European populations, the diaspora was formed through a complex mosaic of voluntary and forced conversions.