‘A Bogus Claim’: Columbia Professor Who Praised Oct. 7 Says Jews Not Descendants of Ancient Hebrews
3rd January 2025
accused Jews of engaging in a “Hitlerian project” for claiming descent from ancient Hebrews during an appearance on a podcast hosted by a professor at Pakistan’s University of Lahore.
Massad said the idea that Jews are descended from ancient Hebrews is a “bogus claim” and called them a “strange European group” during a March 25 episode of InFocus with Ejaz Haider titled “Busting Zionist Myths.” Both Massad and the host, Ejaz Haider, a senior resident fellow at the University of Lahore’s Center for Security, Strategy, and Policy Research, have praised Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack. The podcast is hosted on a platform sponsored by the university, which itself endorsed “the Palestinians’ fight for freedom” in a statement issued one month after the attack.
“The idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews is, of course, a bogus claim,” Massad said. “Even if Jews believed somehow [they had] some lineage, at least a religious or spiritual lineage [to ancient Hebrews], by the 17th and 18th centuries, this idea amongst European Christians would become important, especially to estrange European Jews from Europe, and they begin to cast them as ‘Asiatics’—people who have come from Asia originally.”
“What is special here about Zionism is not only the invention of ancient Israel and the invention of Jews as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, it’s almost like a Hitlerian project to speak of Jews genetically in this fashion,” Massad added. “And it only becomes fashionable, of course, in the 19th century, with the rise of racial science and the biological sciences.”
Massad also said ancient Israel was an invention of archaeology, a field he tied to colonialism.