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Part II of the Series: Prophets, Empires & the Modern World
The Three Branches of Jewry: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi — History, Identity, and the Real Story Behind the Modern Middle East Conflict
Who are the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews? How did two ancient catastrophes — one Babylonian, one Roman — forge three entirely distinct civilizations from a single people? And why is the current Middle East conflict not, as it is so often framed, a Jewish-Muslim conflict at all?
Published as Part II · Series: Prophets, Empires & the Modern World · Continued from Part I
Jewish History Ashkenazi Sephardi Mizrahi Bani Israel Israel-Palestine Islam & Judaism Jesus of Nazareth
Two Catastrophes That Changed Jewish History Forever
To understand who the Jewish people are today — and why the current conflict in the Middle East is so deeply misunderstood — we must go back to two seismic moments of destruction that scattered a single people across the entire known world.
The first catastrophe came in 586 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king, marched on Jerusalem, razed the First Temple (known in Islamic tradition as Haikal-e-Sulaymani — the Temple of Solomon), and took the Jewish people into captivity in Babylon (present-day Iraq). This event, known as the Babylonian Exile, would fundamentally reshape Jewish identity, theology, and geography.
The second blow came in 70 CE, approximately seventy years after the birth of Jesus. The Romans, under General (later Emperor) Titus, destroyed the Second Temple — the same temple that the Jews had rebuilt with the permission and financial patronage of Cyrus the Great of Persia. (Muslims widely identify Cyrus with Dhul-Qarnayn, the “Two-Horned One” mentioned in Surah Al-Kahf of the Quran. The reasons for Cyrus’s special relationship with the Jewish people will be explored in detail in a future installment of this series.)
Between and after these two disasters, a significant number of Jewish families fled south and east, seeking refuge in the Arab territories of the region — areas corresponding to present-day Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Their descendants would come to be known as the Mizrahi Jews. These were the Jewish communities present in Medina during the time of the Prophet Muhammad (?). They were, in the truest sense, Arab Jews.
It is from this single historical rupture — the scattering of the Jewish people — that three major branches of world Jewry were born.
The Three Branches: A Comparative Overview
Understanding these three groups is not merely an academic exercise. It is, in fact, the key to unlocking the real nature of the modern conflict in Gaza, the West Bank, and the broader Middle East.
Branch One
Ashkenazi Jews
Etymology: From Hebrew “Ashkenaz,” associated with Germany Origins: Largely derived from communities in Persia, then Central Asia, and into Eastern Europe Spread: Russia, Poland, Germany, and eventually Western Europe and the Americas Language: Yiddish (Germanic-Hebrew hybrid) Notable: Dominant group in the founding of the State of Israel; every Israeli Prime Minister has been Ashkenazi
Branch Two
Sephardi Jews
Etymology: From Hebrew “Sepharad,” meaning Spain Origins: Jews who migrated from Jerusalem toward the Iberian Peninsula Spread: After 1492 expulsion — Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Istanbul Language: Ladino (medieval Spanish-Hebrew hybrid) Character: Scholars, scientists, philosophers — intellectually formative in the Islamic Golden Age
Branch Three
Mizrahi Jews
Etymology: From Hebrew “Mizrach,” meaning East Origins: Jews who fled to Arab territories during the Babylonian and Roman destructions Spread: Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, North Africa Language: Judeo-Arabic dialects Character: Scholars and merchants; the majority of great Jewish religious authorities were Mizrahi or Sephardi
The Ashkenazi Jews: Warriors, Scholars, and Survivors
The Ashkenazi Jews represent the most politically dominant branch of contemporary Judaism. Their name derives from the Hebrew word Ashkenaz, historically associated with Germany. However, their earliest traceable communities after the destructions of Jerusalem were situated in Persia and Central Asia, before gradually migrating westward into Russia and Eastern Europe.
Genetically, studies published in the National Library of Medicine confirm that approximately 40–60% of the Ashkenazi gene pool derives from European sources, particularly along the maternal line — suggesting significant intermarriage with local European women who converted to Judaism. This makes the Ashkenazi community genetically distinct from both the Sephardi and Mizrahi branches, who retain a far higher proportion of ancient Middle Eastern ancestry.
Historically, the Ashkenazi experience in Europe was one of cyclical persecution. They faced pogroms under the Christian Tsars of Russia, expulsions across medieval Europe, and ultimately the Holocaust under Hitler’s Nazi Germany — a campaign that murdered approximately six million Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were Ashkenazi.
Key Historical Fact
It is a profound and rarely discussed irony of modern history: the people who suffered most in twentieth-century Europe — the Ashkenazi Jews — went on to become the political founders and dominant ruling class of the State of Israel. Today, every single Israeli Prime Minister has been Ashkenazi, despite Mizrahi Jews now constituting more than half of Israel’s Jewish population.
Today, it is largely Ashkenazi political and military leadership that governs Israel, conducts military operations in Gaza, and pursues confrontation with Iran. This distinction — between which branch of Jewry is actually directing these actions — is critical to any honest analysis of the conflict.
The Sephardi Jews: Architects of the Golden Age of Islam
The Sephardi Jews — whose name derives from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Spain — represent one of the most remarkable stories of inter-civilizational collaboration in world history.
After fleeing Jerusalem, these communities made their way to the Iberian Peninsula. For centuries, under Muslim rule in Andalusia, they did not merely survive — they thrived. Córdoba and Granada, the twin capitals of Islamic Spain, were cities of extraordinary intellectual ferment. Jewish scholars, physicians, philosophers, and scientists worked alongside Muslim and Christian counterparts in what historians call the Convivencia — the coexistence. Figures such as Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon), born in Córdoba in 1138, produced works of philosophy and medicine that shaped the entire medieval world.
“In Arab-Muslim territories during the Middle Ages, the Jewish condition was easier, as a rule, than it was in Europe.” — Historian Paul Johnson, cited in academic research on Jewish ethnic divisions
This era ended brutally in 1492 — the same year Columbus sailed to the Americas — when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, expelling all Jews from Spain. It was Muslim rulers who opened their doors: the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II famously welcomed the expelled Jews, reportedly saying that Ferdinand had impoverished his own kingdom by expelling such talented people. Sephardi communities rebuilt in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Istanbul — where many still thrive today.
The Sephardi character, shaped by centuries in Islamic civilization, tends toward intellectualism, peacefulness, and coexistence. They have historically been the least bellicose of the three branches — a fact with direct relevance to the current conflict.
The Mizrahi Jews: The Arab Jews of the Ancient World
The Mizrahi Jews are, in many ways, the oldest continuous diaspora community in the world. Mizrahi means “Eastern” in Hebrew, and these are the Jews who fled south and east during the Babylonian and Roman catastrophes — settling in the Arab lands of the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and Mesopotamia.
Their culture, appearance, language, and customs were so deeply intertwined with the surrounding Arab world that distinguishing them from their Muslim and Christian Arab neighbors was, for centuries, nearly impossible without deliberate inquiry. The Jewish communities of Medina whom the Prophet Muhammad (?) encountered were Mizrahi Jews — Arab-speaking, Arab-looking, Arab-cultured. The great scholars of Jewish law in the medieval period — the Geonim of Babylon — were Mizrahi. The majority of revered Jewish religious authorities throughout history have come from the Mizrahi or Sephardi traditions, not the Ashkenazi.
Today, Mizrahi Jews remain deeply opposed to the Israeli occupation and military campaigns. Their reasoning is not merely political — it is theological. Many Mizrahi religious authorities hold that God did not promise the Jewish people a modern nation-state, and that every attempt to establish one has historically brought catastrophe. They argue, with compelling historical evidence, that Israel’s misfortunes have always followed attempts at political statehood. These communities maintain warm relations with Palestinian Muslims and are among the most vocal Jewish critics of Israeli military policy.
Remarkable Fact
When Hamas or Hezbollah targets an Israeli building, it is widely reported in Arabic-language news — sometimes from the groups themselves — that Mizrahi Jews (Arab Jews) are warned to evacuate before an attack. The distinction between branches is not abstract: it is, in some conflict zones, literally a matter of life and death.
Jesus of Nazareth: A Mizrahi Jew
One of the most consequential and least discussed historical facts about Jesus is that he was, by any meaningful definition, a Mizrahi Jew. He was born in a Jewish community that had been living in the Arab lands for centuries, spoke Aramaic (a Semitic language closely related to Arabic), and in physical appearance — as described by historical and scriptural accounts — would have resembled the Arab people of his region: olive-toned skin, dark hair, brown eyes.
The name we know him by in English — “Jesus” — is a Latinization of the Greek “I?sous,” which is itself a rendering of the Hebrew/Aramaic name Yeshua (also written Yehoshua). His mother, Mary (Maryam in Arabic and Aramaic), was from the village of Nazareth in Galilee. The practice of appending one’s hometown to one’s name was a Persian custom that the Jewish people adopted during their long exile in Babylon — hence Yeshua min Natzrat: Jesus of Nazareth. This is also why Muslims refer to Christians as Nasrani — derived from Nazareth, the hometown of their prophet.
It is one of the great ironies of Western art history that a man who, by every historical and ethnographic account, had the features of an Arab Levantine, has been depicted for centuries with blonde hair and blue eyes — the physical characteristics not of Mizrahi Jews, but of Ashkenazi ones.
The Birth, Flight, and Ministry of Jesus
The story of Jesus’s birth is one of political danger from the outset. Jerusalem at the time was under Roman colonial rule — referred to as Judaea after the Jewish people — with the local client king Herod (Herodes the Great) exercising authority under Roman oversight. The Roman governor of the province was Pontius Pilate.
~6–4 BCE
The Annunciation and the threat from Herod
Mary (Maryam), betrothed to Joseph (Yusuf), a carpenter, conceived Jesus miraculously before the marriage was consummated. Upon learning of this, Herod — warned by astrologers of the birth of a “King of the Jews” — ordered the massacre of all male children under two years of age in Bethlehem and its surroundings.
~6–4 BCE
Flight to Egypt
Joseph, warned in a dream, fled with Mary and the infant Jesus to Egypt, where they lived for approximately four years — until Herod’s death. Islamic and Christian traditions both record this flight, though the Quran does not name Joseph.
~4 BCE – 26 CE
Return to Nazareth; years of ministry in Galilee
After Herod’s death, the family returned to Nazareth in Galilee — a fertile valley between mountains and the Mediterranean coast. Jesus spent his formative years and the majority of his ministry in this region. His earliest disciples were Galilean fishermen. Saint Peter — as foundational to Christianity as Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (R.A.) is to Islam — was himself a fisherman from Galilee who met Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
~29–33 CE
Entry into Jerusalem; trial and crucifixion
Jesus, accompanied by his twelve disciples, entered Jerusalem at approximately 32–33 years of age (scholars disagree on the precise date). The Jewish rabbinical authorities charged him with blasphemy. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate, under pressure, ordered his flogging and crucifixion.
~33 CE
The Ascension — Islamic and Christian accounts diverge
Here the Islamic and Christian narratives part ways. According to the Quran and Islamic tradition, God raised Jesus alive to the heavens — he was not crucified, and a likeness was cast upon another. In Christian theology, Jesus died on the cross, was buried, and rose physically on the third day. Both traditions agree on one critical point: Jesus will return before the Day of Judgment, descending — according to Islamic hadith — at the white minaret of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.
What is significant for our historical analysis is this: the people who persecuted Jesus, brought him before the Roman authorities, and demanded his crucifixion were the Pharisaic rabbinical establishment of Jerusalem — themselves Jewish. The earliest Christians fled from Jewish persecution into Central Asia, Greece, Rome, and across the Mediterranean. For nearly two thousand years after the death of Jesus, it was Christians who persecuted Jews — not Muslims.
The Real History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Not What You Think
Here is a historical argument that will surprise most readers accustomed to the contemporary framing of the “Jewish-Muslim conflict”: for the vast majority of recorded history, Jews and Muslims did not have a fundamental conflict. The real, deep, centuries-long conflict was between Jews and Christians.
Consider the evidence:
After the fall of Granada in 1492, it was the Spanish Christians who expelled the Sephardi Jews — and it was the Muslim Ottoman Empire that welcomed them. The Jews of Muslim Andalusia lived in relative peace for seven centuries. Under the Christian Tsars of Russia, Jewish communities faced systematic pogroms, legal discrimination, and mass murder. Hitler’s Germany — a country with a deeply Christian cultural heritage — perpetrated the Holocaust. For nearly two thousand years, the principal persecutors of the Jewish people were European Christians, not Muslims.
Muslim societies, from Baghdad to Cairo to Istanbul, repeatedly offered Jewish communities refuge, legal protections, and intellectual freedom. The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides was a refugee from Christian persecution in Córdoba who found safety and career in the Muslim court of Saladin in Cairo. The Ottoman Empire absorbed hundreds of thousands of Sephardi Jews after 1492. The Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt was home to one of the most flourishing Jewish communities in the medieval world.
This does not mean the relationship was without friction. During the Prophet’s time in Medina, three specific incidents — involving treaty violations, espionage, and collaboration with the enemy during the Battle of the Trench — led to military confrontations with the Bani Qaynuqa, Bani Nadir, and Bani Qurayza tribes. The Quran addresses these episodes directly. These were political conflicts arising from specific betrayals, not a theological declaration of eternal enmity.
The modern conflict between the State of Israel and the Muslim world is not an ancient religious war resumed. It is a 20th-century political project — Zionism — that arose in Europe, was shaped by European Jewish experience, and was imposed on the Middle East by a specific branch (Ashkenazi) of a deeply divided people.
Four Conclusions That Reframe the Modern Conflict
If we analyze Jewish history up through the era of Jesus with clear eyes, four conclusions emerge that fundamentally alter how we should understand the present:
Jews are not synonymous with the Children of Israel (Bani Israel). The Jewish people are one tribe — Bani Yehuda — among the original twelve tribes of Israel. For approximately 2,700 years, the tribe of Judah has denied the other ten tribes their share of political power and ancestral land. The first conflict of the Jewish people is not with Muslims or Arabs — it is an internal one, with their own kinsmen among the other tribes of Israel, who have been dispossessed for nearly three millennia.
The “Promised Land” was not promised exclusively to the Jews. According to both the Torah and Islamic understanding, the land of Canaan (modern Israel-Palestine) was designated for all twelve tribes of Bani Israel — not for Bani Yehuda alone. The current Israeli state, controlled almost exclusively by Ashkenazi Jews, is thus engaged in a double injustice: the dispossession of Palestinian Muslims and the exclusion of the other eleven tribes of Israel from their covenanted inheritance.
Not all Jews support the Israeli state or its military campaigns. The Mizrahi and Sephardi communities — historically the most peaceful, most learned, and most integrated branches of world Jewry — are largely opposed to Israeli military aggression. Many hold the theological position that God never intended for the Jewish people to have a modern nation-state, pointing to the pattern of catastrophe that has historically followed every such attempt. These communities maintain solidarity with Palestinian Muslims and are among the most vocal Jewish critics of Israeli policy on the global stage.
If there is a deep religious grievance between Jews and any other faith community, it is with Christians, not Muslims. Jewish communities crucified (or facilitated the crucifixion of) the prophet of Christianity, burned the Gospel, and persecuted early Christians into exile. In return, Christian Europe persecuted Jews for two thousand years. Muslims, by contrast, provided refuge, legal protection, and intellectual partnership to Jewish communities in almost every era. The framing of the current Middle East conflict as a “Jewish-Muslim” conflict is historically illiterate. It is, in its modern form, the product of one specific group — the Ashkenazi political and military leadership of Israel — and bears no essential relationship to the long history of Jewish-Muslim coexistence.
What Comes Next: When Did the Modern Conflict Between Muslims and Jews Begin?
After reviewing this history, a natural question arises: if Jews and Muslims have historically lived in relative peace, when did the modern hostility begin? The answer will surprise you.
The roots of the current confrontation between the Israeli state and the Muslim world — and in particular, the specific antagonism between Israel and Iran — do not lie in the founding of Israel in 1948, nor in the Arab-Israeli Wars of the twentieth century. The seeds were planted much earlier, in the sands of seventh-century Arabia, in the immediate aftermath of one of the most consequential events in Islamic history: the tragedy of Karbala.
That story — and the long shadow it has cast across fourteen centuries — is where we turn next.
Continued in Part III From Karbala to the Khilafat: How the tragedy of 680 CE planted the seeds of the modern Israel-Iran confrontation — and why this conflict is far older, and far deeper, than most analysts acknowledge.
AI, Education
The Psychology of Staying Put: Why People Don’t Run When They Should
When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005, officials had issued a mandatory evacuation order for New Orleans more than 24 hours in advance. The storm’s path was well-documented. The warnings were loud and clear. And yet, an estimated 100,000 people stayed behind.
They weren’t all uninformed. They weren’t all unable to leave. Many of them simply didn’t go.
This pattern repeats itself with uncomfortable regularity across disasters of every kind — wildfires, floods, wars, chemical spills. The evacuation order goes out, and a significant portion of the affected population makes the quiet, often fatal decision to stay. Understanding why isn’t just an academic exercise. It’s one of the most important things a person can know about how human beings actually behave under threat.
The Brain Is Not Built for Invisible Danger
The human threat-detection system was shaped over hundreds of thousands of years to respond to immediate, visible danger. A predator. A fire in front of you. A flood already at your door. It is exquisitely calibrated for the present tense.
Abstract danger — a storm system still two hundred miles offshore, a front line advancing slowly through a region, a chemical plume that hasn’t reached your street yet — doesn’t trigger the same visceral alarm. The brain registers the information intellectually, but the gut doesn’t follow. There’s no spike of adrenaline, no overwhelming urge to move. Just a kind of uneasy uncertainty that’s easy to rationalize away.
This is part of why official warnings are less effective than they should be. The information is there, but it arrives in the wrong format for the part of the brain that actually drives behavior.
Normalcy Bias: The World Will Probably Be Fine
One of the most well-documented phenomena in disaster psychology is normalcy bias — the tendency to underestimate both the likelihood and the severity of a crisis because nothing this bad has happened before.
The logic, when made explicit, sounds almost reasonable: I’ve lived in this city my whole life. There have been storms before. The power’s gone out a few times, maybe some flooding in the low-lying areas, but we’ve always come through. Why would this time be any different?
The brain defaults to its archive of past experience. And if that archive doesn’t contain a true catastrophe, it has nothing to calibrate against. The worst-case scenario remains genuinely unimaginable, not in the poetic sense but in a literal, neurological one.
This is also why so many accounts from disaster survivors include some version of the same statement: “I didn’t think it would actually be that bad.” The warning had to compete with a lifetime of evidence that things usually weren’t that bad. And the warning lost.
Loss Aversion: What You Stand to Leave Behind
Leaving feels like losing. That’s not irrational — it’s deeply human, and it’s backed by decades of behavioral economics research.
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that losses feel roughly twice as powerful as equivalent gains. In practical terms, this means that the prospect of abandoning your home, your possessions, your neighborhood — even temporarily — carries an emotional weight that’s genuinely difficult to overcome, even when the rational case for leaving is airtight.
Think about what evacuation actually asks of someone. Leave your home, possibly forever. Leave your belongings, most of which you can’t take. Leave your neighbors, your routines, your sense of place. Accept that you may return to rubble, or may not be allowed to return at all. Go somewhere unfamiliar, probably at your own expense, with no guarantee of when this ends.
Against all that loss, the threat has to feel not just real but immediate and overwhelming. For a lot of people, it never quite crosses that threshold — until it’s too late.
The Anchoring Effect of Home
Beyond the fear of losing things, there’s something harder to quantify: the gravitational pull of place itself.
For many people, especially older residents and those who have lived in the same community for decades, home is not simply a building. It’s an identity. It’s the place where their history lives — the house they raised their children in, the street where their parents are buried nearby, the neighborhood where everyone knows their name. Evacuating doesn’t just mean leaving a structure. It means leaving the physical architecture of a life.
This is particularly pronounced in communities with strong cultural or ethnic ties to a place. Leaving isn’t just uncomfortable. It can feel like a form of erasure, a severing from something essential about who you are. Some people would genuinely rather risk death than accept that.
This isn’t weakness. It’s a measure of how much a place can mean. But it is, under crisis conditions, a potentially lethal attachment.
Social Proof and the Wait-and-See Effect
Human beings are deeply social animals, and in moments of uncertainty, we look to each other for cues about how to behave. If my neighbors are staying, that’s data. If my family thinks the warnings are overblown, that carries weight. If the most respected person on the block says they’ve seen worse and they’re not going anywhere, that shapes my decision more than any official broadcast.
This is social proof operating in the worst possible context. When the people around you collectively underestimate a threat, their collective behavior becomes its own form of evidence. Everyone is watching everyone else, and everyone else is staying, so staying must be reasonable.
The effect is compounded by something called pluralistic ignorance — the phenomenon where most individuals privately harbor doubts or fears, but assume they’re alone in feeling that way because no one around them is visibly alarmed. In the absence of anyone expressing panic, everyone concludes there’s no cause for panic, even when almost everyone is quietly uneasy.
Distrust of Authority
There’s another factor that doesn’t get discussed enough in mainstream accounts of why people fail to evacuate: many of them don’t trust the people telling them to leave.
This is not irrational. In communities that have historically been failed by government institutions — through neglect, displacement, broken promises, or outright harm — an official warning carries a different weight than it does for someone with a baseline of institutional trust. When the government says “leave for your safety,” people who have spent their lives watching government action harm rather than protect them are entitled to ask: safe for whom? And what happens to our neighborhood while we’re gone?
After Katrina, predominantly Black neighborhoods in New Orleans were among the last to receive aid and among the first to be bulldozed for redevelopment. The distrust that led some residents to stay wasn’t purely psychological failure. It was informed by a rational reading of history.
Disaster preparedness communication that ignores this dynamic will always fall short in the communities that need it most.
What This Means for Anyone Trying to Survive
Understanding why people stay isn’t just intellectually interesting — it has practical implications for how you think about your own behavior under threat.
The first implication is this: do not trust your instincts about whether something is dangerous enough to act on. The part of your brain that generates urgency is not calibrated for slow-moving or distant threats. You need to make decisions based on information, not on whether you feel scared enough yet.
The second is to make your decisions in advance. The research on decision-making under stress is unambiguous: people who have predetermined thresholds — if the wind speed reaches X, I leave; if the front advances to Y, I go — are far more likely to act in time than people who are deciding in the moment. When the crisis arrives, your cognitive load is already at maximum. You don’t want to be running cost-benefit analyses while the situation deteriorates.
The third is to be honest about your attachments. Knowing that you have strong ties to a place, to possessions, to community, doesn’t make those ties disappear — but it does allow you to account for their distorting effect. Naming the bias doesn’t eliminate it, but it creates a fighting chance.
And the fourth is to talk to the people around you before a crisis, not during one. The social proof effect works both ways. If the people in your household, your family, your immediate community have already discussed what the trigger for leaving looks like, you’re far less likely to be paralyzed by collective inertia when the moment arrives.
The instinct to stay is not stupidity. It’s human. It’s ancient. It’s built from love of place, distrust of uncertainty, and a brain that was never designed for the kind of abstract, slow-rolling danger that modern disasters often present.
But understanding it — naming the mechanisms clearly and without condescension — is the beginning of being able to act differently when it matters most. The people who make it out are not always the strongest or the best-prepared in any material sense. They’re often simply the ones who understood, in advance, how easy it is to stay too long.
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From Shepherds to Rulers:
The Story of Prophet Dawud (David) and the Rise of the Jewish People
After the return of the Israelites to Palestine, the tribe of Judah (Banu Yahuda) found itself expelled from Jerusalem by the other ten tribes of Israel. The reason, according to biblical tradition, was economic — the Judahites had become notorious moneylenders who, within a few generations, had brought the entire economic system under their control, making the other ten tribes financially dependent on them. Eventually, the ten tribes united and drove Banu Yahuda out of Jerusalem. The exiled tribe settled on the western bank of the Jordan River, barred from trade and left with only two occupations: herding sheep and goats, and working as laborers in Jerusalem’s ironworks — though they were not permitted to remain in the city after sunset. In their hardship, they prayed fervently to God for relief. God answered their prayers by sending Prophet Dawud (David) among them.
Even in childhood, God had blessed Dawud with two remarkable gifts. The first was his voice — extraordinarily beautiful and deeply moving. When he sang, people stopped in their tracks, as though their hearts had momentarily ceased beating. This gift would soon carry him to the royal court. At the time, Palestine was under the rule of the tribe of Benjamin — the tribe of Benjamin, the youngest son of Prophet Jacob. The king was Saul (known in the Quran as Talut). When the king heard the young Dawud sing and play music, he was captivated and brought him into his court as a musician. Dawud was an expert in two instruments of the era — the harp and the lyre. The Quran mentions his magnificent recitation (Lahn Dawudi), while the biblical details about his early career as a court musician come from the Book of Samuel in the Bible.
Dawud was between ten and fifteen years old at the time. His second gift was marksmanship. From childhood, he had practiced with a sling — a length of rope or leather used to hurl stones — and had become the most accurate marksman of the tribe of Judah. He could identify a single fruit on a tree laden with hundreds, swing the sling, and bring down only that fruit. The Prophet Samuel, who belonged to the tribe of Levi and was the spiritual authority of the time, recognized something extraordinary in the boy and prophesied that Dawud would be Israel’s next king and prophet. (The full account of Dawud’s life is recorded in the Book of Samuel in the Bible.)
The defining moment came around 1012 BCE, when the Philistines — a powerful people from the coastal plain of Canaan — launched an assault on the Israelites. Their champion was Goliath (called Jalut in the Quran), a giant warrior from the Philistine city of Gath, standing approximately nine feet tall. The two armies faced each other in the Valley of Elah. Goliath stood in the middle of the field, his body covered in iron and bronze armor from head to toe — with only his forehead left bare. He taunted the Israelites day after day, challenging them to send out a single champion to face him, but no one dared step forward.
Dawud had come to the battlefield merely to bring food to his brother, who was serving in the Israelite army. He arrived to find Goliath mid-taunt. In his bag, Dawud carried his sling and five smooth stones. Without hesitation, he loaded a stone into the sling and ran forward to face the giant. Dawud barely reached Goliath’s knees. Goliath initially refused to fight what he saw as a shepherd boy, mocking both him and the Israelites. But as Goliath turned to address the crowd, Dawud released the sling. The stone flew straight and struck Goliath on the bare forehead — the one unprotected spot. The giant collapsed like a felled tree. Dawud then took Goliath’s own sword and beheaded him. It was over in seconds. The watching armies stood stunned. The Philistines fled in panic, and the Israelites won the battle.
King Saul rewarded Dawud by giving him his daughter Michal in marriage and bringing him into a position of power. This marked the beginning of the restoration of the tribe of Judah’s honor and standing. By 1010 BCE, after Saul’s death, Dawud became king, and the kingdom passed into the hands of Banu Yahuda.
God then bestowed upon Dawud three extraordinary gifts simultaneously: prophethood, kingship, and a revealed scripture. The Psalms (Zabur in Arabic) — the second divinely revealed book after the Torah — were sent down to him. God also gave him a miraculous mastery over iron: in his hands, iron became as pliable as wax. This was particularly significant because the tribe of Judah, during their years of hardship, had worked as ironworkers and metalworkers. Dawud’s family had also made armor as a side trade alongside herding. With iron made soft in his hands, Dawud could bend and shape it with his fingers alone, without tools, crafting chainmail and armor until the end of his life. This tradition of metalworking would become one of the lasting legacies of the Jewish people — to this day, global trade in metals and precious materials is substantially dominated by Jewish business networks.
Under Dawud’s rule, the Judahites transformed from shepherds and laborers into rulers. His kingdom stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates, encompassing present-day Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, much of Iraq, and all of Jordan and Syria — with Jerusalem as its capital. He reigned from 1010 to 970 BCE, a period of forty years.
A brief but fascinating linguistic digression: the Judahites were also skilled goldsmiths and silversmiths. In the Moroccan city of Fez, there was a Jewish quarter where they crafted and sold jewelry. The word “Yahudi” (Jew) traveled through Arabic and Persian into Old English, eventually becoming “Jew” and “Jewish.” The Jewish craftsmen of Fez were also called “Jew” by traders, and their wares became known as “Jewels” — and so the English word “jewelry” traces its roots, through a long linguistic journey, back to these Jewish artisans of North Africa.
After Dawud, God granted both prophethood and kingship to his son, Prophet Sulaiman (Solomon). Sulaiman’s kingdom was vast and his reign legendary. Among his many wives was the Queen of Sheba — known in Islamic tradition as Bilqis, and believed by Ethiopian tradition to have been an ancestor of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews). Their descendants settled in what is today Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Uganda. Ethiopia still has a synagogue said to be over 2,700 years old, belonging to this community.
In 957 BCE, Sulaiman built the First Temple in Jerusalem, constructed around the ancient mosque (place of worship) that Prophet Ibrahim had established there. This Temple became the holiest site in Judaism. Beneath it, Sulaiman entombed the Ark of the Covenant — a wooden chest containing the stone tablets that Prophet Musa brought down from Mount Sinai, along with other sacred relics. The Temple, built over this ark, became the axis of Jewish religious identity and remains so to this day.
This age of glory, however, eventually came to an end. In 586 BCE — roughly 2,600 years ago — the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II (whom the Jews call Nebuchadnezzar, and who is sometimes referred to in Islamic oral history as Bukht Nasr) attacked Jerusalem. He destroyed the First Temple, leaving only its outer western wall standing. He then razed the city, enslaved the Jewish population, and marched them back to Babylon — the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, located in what is now Iraq. There, they were put to work as laborers and builders, in conditions reminiscent of their ancestors’ bondage in Egypt under Pharaoh. This was the most difficult period in Jewish history. Many of the later prophets were sent during this era of captivity, including Prophet Daniel (Daniyel), whose tomb stands to this day in the Iranian city of Susa (Shush).
The Jews remained in Babylonian captivity for approximately fifty years. Then came Cyrus the Great — founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire — who conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and issued what is known as the Edict of Cyrus, freeing all captive peoples and allowing them to return to their homelands. He permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem and even financed the rebuilding of their Temple. Cyrus is so revered in Jewish tradition that the Hebrew Bible calls him “anointed” (Messiah) — the only non-Jewish figure in all of Jewish scripture to receive that title.
After this liberation, the Jewish people split into two groups. One group returned to Jerusalem. Upon arriving, they found the outer western wall of the First Temple still standing. They embraced it and wept — and from that moment, it became known as the Wailing Wall (in Hebrew: HaKotel). This group then rebuilt the Temple (known as the Second Temple), completed around 516 BCE. They came to be known as Sephardic Jews (Sephardim). The Second Temple would later be destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE — but that is another chapter entirely.
The second group chose to remain in Persia. Initially called Persian Jews, they eventually came to be known as Ashkenazi Jews — a name derived from “Ashkabad,” the city that was then part of the Persian Empire and is today the capital of Turkmenistan. From there, branches of these Ashkenazi Jews spread into Germany, Poland, Russia, and Lithuania. Their language was Yiddish — a blend of Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Eastern European tongues.
The Ashkenazi Jews have historically been the most politically assertive and influential Jewish group. Today, approximately 75% of the Israeli military is composed of Ashkenazim. Benjamin Netanyahu himself is of Ashkenazi descent — his father Ben-Zion Netanyahu was from Poland, and his mother Tzila Segal from Lithuania.
A significant portion of the Ashkenazi Jews, however, remained in Iran, where they lived for over 2,700 years. Until the 1980s, Iran had the largest Jewish population outside of Israel in the world. After the Islamic Revolution, many Iranian Jews emigrated — and they hold the Iranian revolutionary establishment largely responsible for their displacement. That grievance, simmering for more than four decades, has shaped their political outlook ever since. (Ironically, today Iranian Jews are widely regarded within Israel as among the most cultured, refined, and well-integrated members of Israeli society.)
Returning to the Ethiopian Jews: in the 1980s and 1991, Israel undertook two major covert airlifts to bring this ancient African Jewish community home. Operation Moses (1984–1985) evacuated approximately 8,000 Ethiopian Jews through Sudan to Israel. Operation Solomon (May 24–25, 1991) was even more remarkable: in just 36 hours, 35 Israeli aircraft made continuous flights and transported 14,325 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa directly to Israel. To accommodate as many people as possible, the seats were stripped from the planes. One El Al Boeing 747 carried 1,122 passengers in a single flight — a world record that still stands. Eight babies were born during the airlift. The entire operation was conducted in near-total secrecy.
These Ethiopian Jews — known as Beta Israel — are today integrated into Israeli society, though not without facing significant social and economic challenges. They are often called Yemeni Jews or Beta Israelis. Within Israel, they have a reputation for toughness and resilience, which sometimes creates friction with other communities. The tensions within Israeli society — between Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Ethiopian Jews, and others — are one of the lesser-discussed but deeply significant fault lines of the modern Israeli state.
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Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States and, like Donald Trump, belonged to the Republican Party. During his presidency, in 1972, surveillance devices were secretly planted in the Democratic Party’s headquarters. Nixon’s associates used these devices to monitor Democratic campaign strategies ahead of the election. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, caught wind of it, investigated, and broke the story. The publication ended Nixon’s political career. Since the Democratic Party’s office was located in the Watergate Complex in Washington, the scandal became known as the Watergate Scandal — arguably one of the most consequential political stories in modern history.
Nixon was nominally Christian but held little genuine religious conviction. He rarely attended church and reportedly disliked clergy. His Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was similarly a non-practicing Jew with little religious inclination. Yet at the height of the Watergate crisis, Nixon called Kissinger to the White House late one night. Kissinger, sensing urgency, rushed to the Oval Office. Nixon closed the door and turned to him:
“I am a weak Christian and you are a Jew in name only — but I feel that if we pray together, perhaps our troubles may ease. Perhaps God will have mercy on us.”
Nixon then dropped to his knees, faced Jerusalem, and began reciting verses from the Bible. Kissinger, as his subordinate, followed suit — kneeling and calling upon God in Hebrew.
Kissinger himself recorded this episode and recounted it in multiple speeches. It reveals something profound about human nature. Our professions, titles, and responsibilities can make us feel invincible — but the moment we encounter our own “Watergate,” something breaks inside us. Whether you are Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger, whether you sit in the most powerful office on earth or behind a modest shop counter, you inevitably fall to your knees before God.
History bears this out repeatedly. Alexander the Great marched to war with religious representatives by his side. Darius III had his own spiritual advisors. Genghis Khan followed no formal religion, yet on the battlefield he sought prayers from Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu clergy alike. Timur the Lame — one of history’s most brutal conquerors — would pray before every battle, and immediately after combat, wash the blood from his hands, perform ablution, and offer prayer. Every Ottoman sultan kept personal scholars and spiritual guides who traveled with them and provided religious and emotional support in times of crisis.
In Pakistan’s own political history, the pattern is unmistakable. Ayub Khan was deeply superstitious, leaning on figures ranging from Baba Lal to Qudratullah Shahab for spiritual reassurance. Benazir Bhutto, in the depths of political turmoil, once traveled to the hills of Mansehra to seek blessings from a renowned mystic. Nawaz Sharif kept spiritual figures close throughout his career. Asif Ali Zardari was a devotee of over a dozen saints, keeping three spiritual personalities resident in the presidency itself — they reportedly blew prayers over the tires of his presidential motorcade before every departure. A black goat was sacrificed as charity each time he left the building — a ritual said to continue to this day. Imran Khan, for his part, brought his spiritual guide into his own home. Bushra Bibi reportedly threw meat from rooftops daily to ward off evil, and even today, prayers are being offered at three shrines for his release from prison.
What does all of this prove? It proves that whether you are Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, or Richard Nixon, human beings seek refuge in the idea of God when the ground shifts beneath them. We kneel — and that kneeling is not a sign of faith so much as it is a sign of fear. It is an acknowledgment that the crisis before us is greater than our own capacity, and that we need a power beyond ourselves to survive it.
Trump’s Oval Office Prayer — A Modern Parallel
If you keep this fundamental human weakness in mind and watch what unfolded at the White House on March 6, the picture becomes clear. Trump summoned prominent pastors from across America to the Oval Office, sat in the presidential chair, and had them stand behind him, place their hands on his shoulders, and pray for victory against Iran. After this footage circulated, even figures like Senator Lindsey Graham began suggesting that the conflict between America, Israel, and Iran is a religious war. The debate spread from Washington to Islamabad.
But it is not a religious war. It is a war over resources — over oil, over gas, over geopolitical control. Religion has nothing to do with it. Trump’s summoning of pastors, his bowed head, his seeking of divine blessing — these are symptoms of fear, not faith. Like Nixon before him, he is reaching for religion because he is afraid. Iran’s unexpected resilience, its unity following the martyrdom of Ayatollah Khamenei, its fierce and sustained resistance shook both Trump and Netanyahu. They had anticipated that Iran would fracture and fall into internal chaos, opening the door to the world’s second-largest reserves of oil and gas. Instead, Iran held together and hit back hard — hard enough that even Donald Trump felt compelled to seek God.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has been photographed wearing the traditional black Jewish kippah with increasing frequency. This, too, is the same signal. It is fear dressed as faith.
The Roots of Judaism: A Historical Overview
To understand the deeper context of this conflict, it helps to trace the historical roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — beginning with the origins of the Jewish people.
“Israel” was the title given to the Prophet Jacob (peace be upon him). His twelve sons became the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Bani Israel. Their names were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Joseph, and Benjamin. These tribes eventually settled in twelve different regions of Egypt.
The Prophet Moses (peace be upon him) belonged to the tribe of Levi. Interestingly, the globally famous clothing brands Levi’s and Levis take their name from this very tribe. The Levites were traditionally craftsmen and religious scholars — even today, most Jewish rabbis trace their lineage to the Levite tribe. Moses’s brother, the Prophet Aaron (peace be upon him), was the world’s first Cohen (high priest), and the priestly lineage has continued through his descendants.
Moses united the tribes and led them back toward Canaan (Palestine). The tribe of Dan was lost along the way and has never been accounted for. Some Pashtuns in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province claim descent from the lost tribe of Dan — but this claim does not hold up historically. The distance from the Sinai Desert to the Khyber Pass spans dozens of major civilizations and kingdoms. Why would a tribe bypassing all of those settled societies settle in a comparatively remote and underdeveloped region, especially one that was then a passage for violent nomads like the Huns? Furthermore, the tribe of Dan was known for strategy and intellect, not warfare — while the tribal communities of that region have historically been defined by martial culture. Modern DNA science has also now confirmed that Pakistan’s Pashtuns are not descended from Bani Israel.
Moses led the remaining eleven tribes to the borders of Canaan. At Mount Nebo in present-day Jordan, his journey ended and he passed away. His successor, the Prophet Joshua bin Nun (peace be upon him), led Bani Israel forward. The Battle of Jericho followed, and God granted them victory — returning to them the land that had been promised.
After reclaiming Palestine, ten of the eleven tribes united and expelled the eleventh — the tribe of Judah — from Jerusalem. The tribe of Judah settled on the western bank of the Jordan River, in the area now known as the West Bank. They were a poor and marginalized people: shepherds who worked in the homes and fields of other communities in Jerusalem. They were permitted into the city only during daylight hours and were forbidden from spending the night inside — returning each evening to the West Bank after a day of labor.
These were the descendants of Jacob’s fourth son, Judah — written in English as “Judah.” In time, his descendants became known as “Jews” — the word itself derived from his name.
According to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, when the Prophet Joseph’s (peace be upon him) brothers decided to kill him, it was the eldest brother Reuben who saved him, arguing that Joseph was their blood. Simeon and Levi then suggested throwing him into a dry well in the desert, reasoning he would either die of thirst or be taken by wild animals. But Judah proposed selling him to passing Midianite traders. The city of Midian — associated with the people of the Prophet Salih (peace be upon him) — stretched across what is now Saudi Arabia to Salalah in Oman, and hosted the largest slave markets of the ancient world. Traders moved between the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and Joseph’s well lay directly along this trade route.
According to the biblical account in Genesis, Judah convinced his brothers: “What profit is it if we kill our brother? Let us sell him to the Ishmaelites.” The going price for a handsome young slave was twenty silver coins. The brothers initially refused, threw Joseph into the well, and walked away — only to see a Midianite caravan approaching. Judah persuaded them again, and this time they agreed. They returned to the well, retrieved Joseph, and sold him for twenty-two silver shekels to the Midianite traders who were heading to Egypt.
(Note: This is the biblical version. According to the Quran, it was the traders themselves who discovered and pulled Joseph from the well — his brothers were not present at that moment.)
The descendants of Judah came to be called Jews. And in the pattern of their ancestor, they have historically been traders by nature — people who, when the price was right, would sell even a brother.
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The article continues with the origins of Christianity and Islam, and their historical relationship with political power and warfare — a story for the next time.
