Japheth and Shem

Indo-Europeans, Jewish History, and Roman Interpretation

Hendrick ter Brugghen, Esau Selling His Birthright, c. 1627.

The following is an excerpt from REM, vol. I: The Birth of Tragedy, to be published in 2024.

“Aryan” is a designation used throughout this study. The term might be contentious, even inflammatory, in this day and age, but it need not be so. “Aryan” can be taken as roughly synonymous with “White” or “European,” as those words are commonly used. That said, the term is more accurately equated with “Indo-Euroepan,” a global group of peoples speaking closely related languages. “Aryan” itself derives from the Sanskrit word arya. J.P. Mallory relays, “By the first century AD, historical records reveal peoples settled form the shores of the Atlantic to India all speaking languages closely related to one another.

These are the Indo-European languages, whose origins can be traced back to a common ancestor [Proto-Indo-European] that was spoken in Eurasia some 6,000 years ago....

If details are still a matter of controversy, the Indo-Europeans hypothesis is most certainly not. It is the only explanation that can convincingly account for why approximately half of the earth’s population speaks in languages clearly related to one another. This requires the assumption that at some time and some place in Eurasia, there existed a population which spoke a language directly ancestral to all of those we now recognize as Indo-European.¹

The Aryans were the Mycenaean Greeks, Hittites, Indo-Iranians, Celts, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, Balts, Slavs, Norsemen, and others. Unsurprisingly, we know precious little about their prehistoric culture and folkways; artifacts and remains, and thus genetic material, are scant. Indo-Europeans can be studied linguistically, however. Words like rex (“king”) in Latin and raj (“ruler” or “state”) in Hindi are clearly cognates; that is, they come from a common root word, reg, which spread thousands of miles to the Indian subcontinent and Italian peninsula, and mutated along the way. We see the same with the English “snow,” German Snee, Russian sneg, and French neige (with a dropped “s”). Interestingly, this phenomenon does not recur with the same regularity for all maritime and nautical words (“sea,” See, mer, more, etc.). This suggests that new words were developed for bodies of water after the population had divided. As early as the 16th century, French scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) observed distinct patterns in how different groups expressed the concept of “god”: The Latin deus gives us the Italian dio, Spanish dio French dieu; in Central and Northern Europe, we find the German Gott, Dutch god, Swedish gud, and English “god”; further east, we encounter the Russian bog, Ukrainian bog, Polish bog, and Czech buh.² Scaliger had uncovered the Romantic, Germanic, and Slavic language groups, each of which are inter-related but define major junctures in history, geography, and culture. The mutation of individual words might be random, but major divergences reflect migrations, splittings, conquests, and collapses. “Indo-European” is, strictly speaking, not a biological or racial category, but then its development does imply an original people living in an original homeland. Such a homeland might be found on the Eurasian plateau; its discovery, however, along with the apprehension of a “Proto-Indo-Europea” tongue, are matters of informed speculation.

Our use of “Aryan” in this study connotes race, one which predominates in Europe as well as many other lands across the world.³ Jews came into contact with Aryans and keenly categorized and observed them. As alluded to earlier, biblically speaking, Aryans are “Japhetites,” the descendants of Noah’s son Japheth. Again, Shem is the forefather of Jews and Arabs, this Greek name “Shem” being the root of “Semite.” Noah’s third son, Ham, is the ancestor of Africans and Egyptians (see I, §2). Though Ham plays a role in what will be discussed in this study, Japheth vs. Shem is the fundamental dynamic. It is arguably the fulcrum of world history: Esau vs. Jacob, Edom vs. Judah, Rome vs. Jerusalem.   

“Jew” is certainly a less contested category than “Aryan,” as the latter refers to adherents of the universally recognized religion of Judaism and followers of the Torah. Even here, though, we encounter slippage, for “Jew” is also an ethnic category. One can be an “atheist Jew,” say, in a way that one cannot be an “atheist Catholic.”⁴ A Jew is part of an ethnic line, whether or not he believes in his god or not. The first recorded account of Jews comes from a fragment of a manuscript from the fourth century BC. Jews were classed then as a “people of philosophers” or priestly class among the Syrians (see VIII, §2). Jews themselves understand their history as hearkening back 4,000 years: “From Moses to Sandy Koufax,” in the memorable words of Walter from The Big Lewbowski. This would date back to David’s kingdom and Solomon’s holy temple, putatively a thousand years before Christ, and even further to Abraham, to whom Yahweh first revealed himself. We will bring much of this story into doubt; in fact, we question whether the Bible possess any sort of historicity whatsoever (see V, §1). We do not, however, deny Jews’ antiquity and staying power. Indeed, “4,000 years” is probably an underestimation.

Our hypothesis presumes that Jews or “proto-Jews” have persisted within Aryan civilizations since Sumer (circa 5,000 BC). They operated as a “people of philosophers” and priests. Before they were known as “Jews,” they were known by other names and cults, and through REM, these cults can be identified. This list includes the Etruscans, Lemnians, and Pelasgians (at least as they appear in the mytho-historical literature), and it might include the mysterious “Sea People.” Likewise it includes the Zoroastrian Magi. Proto-Jews are detectable especially in chthonic, lunar, and fire cults appearing throughout the ancient world. These cults include the Sumerian adherents of Enlil, Nanna, Dumuzid, and Ningishzida. They also include the Egyptian cults of Ptah, Amun, Thoth, Yah, Set, and Osiris, as well as the Phoenician cults of El and Adonis. In the Greco-Roman world, Jews appeared in the form of Vulcan, Bacchus, Mercury, Saturn, Pluto, the Idaean Dactyls, and the Lemnian Cabeiri. Gods like Vulcan and Ptah, as well as the biblical figure Solomon, are especially telling manifestations of the Jewish god, as they are temple builders, idol makers, propagandists, and priests. Jews are, in a word, Promethean. Meaningfully, Jews or proto-Jews themselves appear to identify with chthonic, lunar, and nocturnal identities. In other words, it is not a case of Aryans thrusting these designations upon them, even if this may have occurred in some instances. Rather, it is the case of Jews and proto-Jews eagerly embracing the mantle of the secretive and mysterious “other.”

The REM method is, to a great extent, an updated form of Interpretatio Romana, an ancient system of comparative mythography involving understanding gods through analogy and equation. Every schoolboy learns that the Greeks worshiped Zeus and the Romans, Jupiter, and that these two god were the same.⁵ The differences between Zeus and Jupiter (to the extent that there are any) are matters of the passage of time, differing locals, and poetic refinements. It might be more surprising to learn that Odin or Wotan is a form of Mercury. Perhaps it is infuriating to learn that Yahweh, the god of the Bible, contains elements of Saturn, Vulcan, and Bacchus, and that Jesus Christ is, among other things, a derivative of Adonis (see X, §4). Jesus and Yahweh are, in this fashion, composite gods; that is, they encompass two or more deities in conflation. Such is the way of reading myth—and the Hebrew Bible and Gospels are fundamentally myths—after the Roman style.

Mainstream academics, by the nature of their profession, inevitably engage in specialization, and thus are prone to short-sightedness, indeed, blindness to fields outside their expertise. They cannot see the “big picture” and find the connecting threads. This is to say nothing of their subservience to taboos—and the sacredness of Judaism and Christianity remains a taboo even in our secular age. Here, as “amateurs” and “generalists,” we have the advantage. Much like the Aryan peoples can be traced through the development of their languages and connected through cognates, Jews can be located and understood through the development of their myths or “mythical cognates,” if you will. This thread passes through Sumer, the Hebrew Bible, Greek religion and philosophy, Medieval Christianity, and, more recently, “Hollywood” in all its form: films, television, video games, and popular music.

The depth of this culture transmission should not be underestimated. Frequently, myths and important components of language and culture, formerly assumed to be “pagan” or indigenous, have been intelligently developed by proto-Jews, crypto-Jews, or Jews proper, as a means of inserting JEM among less sophisticated Aryan or Gentile populations. We call this Promethean Transmission. Here crypto-Jews or proto-Jews may have appeared among Aryans as bards, skalds, poets, goðar, druids, shamans, priests, philosophers, merchants, artisans, or tradespeople. Their submissions were “anonymous.”

1. J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 7, 22.

2. See J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.

3. Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) was the first prominent writer to conceive of “Aryan” as a racial category in his L’inégalité des races humaines (1853–55).

4. There’s an old joke: An Irishman asks a stranger, “Are you a Catholic or Protestant?” The stranger answers, “I’m an atheist.” The Irishman continues, “A Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” This implies that, in Ireland at least, “Catholic” and “Protestant” are as much political and ethnic categories as they are religious ones.

5. The word “Jupiter” comes from the Proto-Indo-European *dyeu-peter- “god-father”; Zeus comes from the PIE *dewos- “god,” which itself derives from root *dyeu- “to shine.”