Talk:Jews
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Content disputes
“Originating from the Israelites of ancient Israel and Judah”
This line in the opening sentence presents a contested historical claim as settled fact despite the archaeological and genetic evidence being genuinely complicated:
∙ The “Exodus” narrative has no archaeological support and is largely rejected by mainstream archaeologists including Israeli ones (Finkelstein and Silberman being the most prominent)
∙ The Israelites are now broadly understood by archaeologists to have been an indigenous Canaanite population, not a distinct people who arrived from outside
∙ Modern Jewish populations show considerable genetic diversity consistent with significant admixture across diaspora communities over millennia — Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, etc. have quite different genetic profiles
∙ The claim of direct ethnic continuity from Bronze Age Levantine people to a modern global population is doing enormous ancestral and political work that the evidence doesn’t cleanly support
A neutral article would say something like “traditionally tracing their origins to” or “whose religious texts describe descent from” - flagging it as a tradition or claim rather than established historical fact. Mirammm (talk) 19:27, 8 April 2026 (UTC)
- Jews are successors to the Israelites, that’s a fact. There are references.
- It wasn’t claimed in the preamble that they came from outside. While they probably did emerge from Canaanite peoples, they’re still a distinct group.
- At least most Jewish diaspora communities are genetically related to each other and have established descent from Israel.
- See also:
- History of the Jews and Judaism in the Land of Israel
- Genetic studies of Jews עמית לונן (talk) 11:53, 5 May 2026 (UTC)
“Ethnoreligious group and nation”
This is probably the most loaded phrase in the entire article and again, it is in the first sentence.
Three separate and genuinely contested categories are being fused into a single definitional statement:
∙ Ethnic group — implies shared biological or ancestral descent, which is contested
∙ Religious group — the most straightforwardly defensible part, but even this is complicated by the existence of secular or atheist Jews who claim Jewish identity
∙ Nation — this is an explicitly modern political concept being retroactively applied. “Nation” in the contemporary sense implies a people with a legitimate claim to territorial sovereignty. Embedding it in the definition of Jewish people quietly naturalises the entire Zionist political project without having to argue for it
The term “ethnoreligious” itself also appears to be applied uniquely to Jews in this politically loaded tripartite way.
“Nation” should be removed from the opening definition entirely, or at minimum flagged as a contested and politically significant claim rather than a neutral descriptor. Mirammm (talk) 19:33, 8 April 2026 (UTC)
- Going all the way back to the Torah it describes Jews/Israelites as a Nation (the Jewish People are referred to as "Goy" in the Covenant which is Hebrew for a Nation) Even if the modern usage of Nation has evolved that doesn't change the original text from that era. ~2026-30153-69 (talk) 20:34, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
Circular definition
The article defines Jews as originating from Israelites, while our primary historical sources on the Israelites are texts produced within the same tradition.
This creates a circularity that forecloses legitimate scholarly questions about the actual demographic and ethnic composition of the ancient Levant and the degree of continuity between ancient and modern populations.
Per WP:V and WP:NPOV, articles should not uncritically adopt a group’s own self-description as the basis for ethnic or historical classification without acknowledging that this is a self-described tradition.
Comparable articles on other peoples typically acknowledge the distinction between traditional self-description and archaeological or genetic evidence. Mirammm (talk) 19:40, 8 April 2026 (UTC)
Founding of Israel: significant historical omission of the Nakba
The section covering the founding of the State of Israel contains a significant and verifiable omission that constitutes an NPOV violation under Wikipedia policy.
The paragraph describes Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 declaration of statehood, then states that “all neighbouring Arab states invaded.” This framing presents the 1948 war as beginning with Arab aggression against a newly declared state, while entirely omitting the preceding and concurrent displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs — an event documented extensively in historical scholarship and known in Arabic as the Nakba (“catastrophe”).
The Nakba has its own Wikipedia article, is documented by Israeli historians including Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé, and is recognised by the United Nations. Its complete absence from this article while the founding of Israel is described in terms of Jewish people “returning to their ancestral homeland” represents a one-sided account that fails the requirements of WP:NPOV.
The article cannot accurately describe the establishment of Israel without acknowledging the displacement of the population that preceded and accompanied it.
This is mainstream historical scholarship. The article should be amended to include factual coverage of the Nakba proportionate to its historical significance. Mirammm (talk) 19:55, 8 April 2026 (UTC)
- How about you stop repeating the same things over and over. ~2026-23417-42 (talk) 01:27, 16 April 2026 (UTC)
the Jewish people
Hello @Oklopfer: there has been some back and forth on the bolding of this definite article, so I’m hoping that this thread can maybe result in adding some hidden text there to clarify whatever the consensus is.
In this article, the topic is an ethnoreligious group named Jews. We present “the Jewish people” as an alternate title (WP:OTHERNAMES) to “Jews”. I don’t know that article title rules apply to alternate names, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t.
The issue is that “people” can have two meanings. It can mean the plural of person or it can mean “a group of people who make up a race, tribe, nation, etc. “Jewish people” means plural Jewish persons. However, per our cited sources, “the Jewish people” means the whole ethnoreligious group.
Per WP:THE since it has different meanings with or without the definite article, then the definite article should be considered to be part of the alternate name, and I would think that means the definite article should be bolded along with the rest of the alt name. Thoughts? Mikewem (talk) 01:24, 9 April 2026 (UTC)
- @Mikewem a few points:
- From what I saw in the page history, it seems like the dispute extends to whether the definite should be there at all, not just if it should be in bold; it is also apparent you are arguing in favor of this inclusion, which I don't necessarily reject. However...
- To give a simple equivalent example without bolding of the definite article, English people starts off with
The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England
. - The full guideline of WP:THE regarding different meaning with or without the definite article reads
If a term with a definite article has a different meaning with respect to the same term without the article, the term with the article can be used as the name of a Wikipedia article about that meaning, and the term without the article can be used as the name of a separate Wikipedia article.
It then gives the example of Crown vs. The Crown, clearly two articles that would need a semantic distinction. On the contrary, The Jewish people and Jewish people are the same article, and I find it highly unlikely these two would ever be split up to make a semantic distinction. The English people and English people only differ in their targets because the former is a disambiguation due to Orwell's essay of the same name; The English redirects to the latter. - By extension of your argument that Jewish people could refer to either a subset of Jewish individuals or to the group as a whole, I find it incongruent that the same argument is not being made for Jews vs. the Jews; the former is still broader terminology that could simply refer to a subset of individuals and not the group as a whole. I recognize that this is almost certainly because the Jews is often found to be used in a pejorative sense, but based purely on semantics it still feels like the same consideration must be made. Again, Jews and The Jews point to the same place, and I find it highly unlikely those would be split either.
- So then the question becomes: what purpose does the definite article actually serve, and does bolding actually follow precedence? I would argue it does not follow precedence to bold it, even if included. Essentially all of our other <insert ethnic group> people articles do not bold it (I can't think of any examples that do, though I am not ruling out their existence), and it seems the choice to include the definite in the first place is largely a stylistic choice; for example, while it is included at the beginning of English people, it is not included at the beginning of Scottish people. ~ oklopfer (💬) 02:12, 9 April 2026 (UTC)
- I think the dispute extends to whether an alt name should be there at all. Bolding ‘the’ seemed like a workable solution, but if it’s not, then it’s not. Mikewem (talk) 18:47, 9 April 2026 (UTC)
Language fix request
Please correct "predominately" to "predominantly". Check Wiktionary entries if unsure. ~2026-28292-21 (talk) 11:33, 10 May 2026 (UTC)
Done. Newbzy (talk) 08:07, 13 July 2026 (UTC)
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