During Tucker Carlson’s combative interview with the American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, Carlson challenged Huckabee on the right of Jews to live in Israel. Carlson questioned whether modern-day Israeli Jews share any genetic relation to the ancient Israelites, calling for all Israeli Jews to undergo DNA testing. Carlson, probably the most influential antisemite in the United States, was channeling an ancient calumny leveled for millennia against the Jewish people – that today’s Jews are not the true Jews.[1] This libel takes many forms – that God has rejected and replaced the Jewish people, that the Jews falsified Scripture, or, Carlson’s favorite trope, that modern Jews are really Khazars, a Central Asian tribe that may have converted to Judaism in the 8th century.
What unites these diverse ideologies is a shared tendency to reduce the Jewish people to secondary actors within their own expansive worldviews. Whether viewing Jews merely as a symbolic prefiguration that validates the Gospel, as “book-bearers” of their own supposed error, or as universalist enemies of modern nationalism, these frameworks leave no room for Jewish personal agency. By casting Jews in these predetermined roles, supersessionist thought – whether religious or secular – denies the Jewish people the right to continue and define their own story on their own terms.
Roots of Resilience: The Eternal Bond and Ancient Covenant
Traditional Judaism believes that God chose the forefathers of the Jewish people, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and later entered an eternal covenant with their descendants, the Children of Israel. The Book of Exodus (19:5) lays out the terms of God’s promise before the Revelation at Sinai: “If you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is Mine.”[2] The Covenant is expressed by the Jewish people’s receiving the laws of the Torah and the promise of the land of Israel.
The books of the Prophets, spanning from the entry into the Land under Joshua through the return from the Babylonian exile, detail the Jewish people’s persistent failings and breaches of the Covenant. With great pathos, the Prophets describe God as raging like a jealous husband and a betrayed father at the disloyalty of His beloved people. In one of many such statements, the Prophet Jeremiah (31:36-37) has God swear: “‘If these laws [the natural laws] depart from before Me, says the Lord, so will the seed of Israel cease being a nation before Me for all time.’ So said the Lord: ‘If the heavens above will be measured and the foundations of the earth below will be fathomed, I too will reject all the seed of Israel because of all they did, says the Lord.’”[3]
While many secular Jews may not share traditional Jewish notions of chosenness and divine promise, they continue to affirm the Jewish people’s continued role in history. In 1961, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Yaakov Herzog (and uncle of the current Israeli president, Isaac Herzog) debated the British historian Arnold Toynbee, who had claimed that the Jewish people were simply a preserved fossil. According to Herzog, the reestablishment of the State of Israel was the Jewish people’s assertion of their will to live, despite attempts at their annihilation.Herzog, in one of his speeches, said:
How has the Jewish People, a third of whose sons and daughters were led to slaughter only a half-century ago in endless humiliation, in unmitigated cruelty, who were at the nadir of their fortunes, flung to the abyss of a cruel and merciless fate – whence do they rise again, phoenix-like, with force, with vigor, with faith and regain the capital of their eternity, Jerusalem?
… Israel represents a vindication of faith and prayer through the ages; it is a symbol of revival, a message of hope, indeed lasting evidence of the integrity of the spirit.[4]
The Verus Israel Myth: Foundations of Christian Replacement Theology
Former Miss California, Carrie Prejean Boller, insisted before the Religious Liberty Commission that she was a Catholic and therefore opposed to Zionism.[5] Prejean Boller was drawing on ancient Christian beliefs, insisting on the rejection of the Jewish people. Candace Owens, another conservative activist and antisemitic conspiracy theorist, frequently asserts that Christian doctrine denies Jews a homeland.[6]
In the second century CE, the Church Fathers articulated the theology of supersessionism, according to which the Jewish people had been excluded from God’s grace for refusing to accept Christ, whose coming had supposedly been foretold by the Jewish Scriptures themselves. Instead of the Jewish people, who may have been carnal descendants of Abraham, the followers of Christ were Verus Israel, the True Israel of the spirit. Around the year 160, Justin Martyr imagined a dialogue with a Jew named Trypho.[7] In this early example of Replacement theology, Justin told Trypho that the Law of Moses was obsolete and that the Church had inherited the promises made to Israel. In fact, Jewish suffering and dispossession were signs of divine punishment for their failure to recognize the truth of Christianity.
Tertullian, one of the founders of Western Christianity, continued Justin Martyr’s polemical tradition against the Jews. Tertullian expounds on Judaism as a prefiguration, or a carnal symbol, hinting at Jesus’ ultimate coming. According to this theology, the biblical commandment of circumcision, which Jews practice until this day, is really a sign for spiritual circumcision of the heart. Judaism’s role is to serve as a typology for Christianity’s ultimate truth.
Tertulian, in his Apology (Apologeticus), emphasized that Jewish exile was retribution for deicide:
“In former times the Jews enjoyed much of God’s favor… But how deeply they have sinned, puffed up to their fall with a false trust in their noble ancestors, turning from God’s way into a way of sheer impiety, though they themselves should refuse to admit it, their present national ruin would afford sufficient proof. Scattered abroad, a race of wanderers, exiles from their own land and clime, they roam over the whole world without either a human or a heavenly king, not possessing even the stranger’s right to set so much as a simple footstep in their native country.”[8]
Augustine of Hippo, writing in the fourth century CE, explained the continued existence of the Jewish people despite their stubbornness and refusal to submit to Christianity. For Augustine, the Jews were a living witness to the truth of the Scriptures and the Gospel. He argued that Jews should not be killed or forcibly converted but rather preserved in a state of visible subjugation. He interpreted their diaspora and the loss of their Temple as divine punishment for the rejection of Christ; thus, their presence – and their adherence to the Old Testament – demonstrated to the world that the prophecies regarding Jesus were ancient and authentic, not inventions of the later Church. By maintaining their traditional laws without the “spiritual” understanding Augustine claimed for Christians, the Jewish people were cast as “scriniaria” (book-bearers), carrying the very scriptures that, in Augustine’s view, proved their own error and the Church’s triumph.[9]
The theological significance of Jewish dispossession militated against Christian support for Jewish liberation. In January 1904, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, tried to enlist Pope Pius X to support Jewish statehood. Pius’ reply was blunt: “The Jews have not recognized our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people,” with the concluding remark, “If you come to Palestine and settle your people there, we will have churches and priests ready to baptize all of you.”[10] Catholic frostiness towards Zionism continued even after the State of Israel was established in 1948. In 1964, Pope Paul VI took the first papal trip to the State of Israel. Throughout, however, he refused to utter the word “Israel,” billing it simply “the Holy Land.” He refused to meet the Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim and would not step foot in Western Jerusalem, Israel’s capital.
Of course, theological anti-Zionism and supersessionism are not the only Christian positions. In the sixteenth century, many Protestants anticipated the Jewish people’s return to their homeland. These beliefs formed the basis of later Christian Zionism, which became a powerful movement in the twentieth century.[11] As for Catholics, the Church issued the Nostra aetate declaration in 1965, according to which “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.”[12] To mark the 50th anniversary of Nostra aetate, the Church in 2015 released a document called “the Gifts and Calling of God are Irrevocable,”[13] in which it affirmed that the covenant God made with the Jewish people was never revoked or replaced by the Christian covenant. Because God is faithful, His promises to Israel remain valid and active.
Subjugation and Stolen Legacy: The Islamic Framework of Supersessionism
Islam understands itself as the final revelation, completing and perfecting what was originally prophesied in the Torah and Gospels. The Qur’an addresses itself in many places to Jews and Christians, calling upon them to recognize Islam as confirmed by their own Scriptures. As the Qur’an states in the Chapter of the Women: “O you who have been given the Scripture! Believe in what We have revealed, confirming what is (already) with you…”[14]
Confronted with the reality that Jews rejected the message of Islam, Muslim scholars developed the concept of tahrif, according to which Jews (and Christians) falsified the Scriptures and expunged references to Muhammad’s ultimate coming.[15] Like Christianity’s claim to be the true Israel, Islam appropriated for itself the true legacy of Abraham, the prophet. In Sūrat Āl ʿImrān, the Qur’an rejects any claim the Jews may have to the Jewish prophets. According to the Qur’an, “Abraham was not a Jew, nor yet a Christian, rather he was a Muslim hanif (monotheist), and not one of those who associate other beings with God.”[16] Jews are not privileged bearers of tradition but rather blind transmitters of the Scriptures: “The likeness of those who were charged with the Law of Moses, but who failed it, is as the likeness of an ass carrying great books.”[17]
The tenth-century Quranic exegete al-Tabari explained the history of the abrogation of Judaism: “The faith of the Jews prescribed cleaving to the Torah and to the sunna (tradition) of Moses until Jesus came. Once Jesus came… whoever did not reject these and follow Jesus was condemned to perdition… Once Muhammad came, whoever of them did not follow Muhammad… was lost.”[18] In sum, Judaism is an annulled faith, no longer valid since Muhammad’s revelation.
The price of Jewish disobedience was political subjugation, as mandated by the Qur’an: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day, nor comply with what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth from among those who were given the Scripture, until they pay the tax, willingly submitting, fully humbled.”[19] Though not always followed in practice, Islam mandated that Jews (and Christians) be humbled or humiliated, forced to pay the discriminatory jizyah tax. This subjugated status, known as dhimmi, continues to color Muslim attitudes towards Jewish sovereignty in Israel. Ibn Kathir, a prominent Muslim commentator in the fourteenth century, held that the Children of Israel are to be plagued with eternal humiliation: “They will continue to suffer humiliation at the hands of those who interact with them, along with the disgrace that they feel inwardly.”[20]
Much of the Arab and Muslim war against the State of Israel is driven by the contradiction between Jewish power and their divinely mandated lowly status. Following the Arab defeat in 1967, the Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research convened in Cairo in 1968 to discuss the religious meaning of the Israeli victory and the wider war against Israel. In his inaugural address, Sheikh Hassan Ma’moun, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, noted the “bitterness” of the Arab defeat, describing those whom the Qur’an describes as having “humiliation and wretchedness stamped upon them.”[21] In a lengthy paper submitted to the conference, Muhammad El-Sayyed Husein al-Dahabi explicitly invoked al-Tabari, who stated that the Jewish people had lost their state due to their killing of the Prophets, highlighting the theological illegitimacy of Israel’s very existence.[22]
On October 7, 2023, Hamas perpetrated the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Until his passing in 2022, Egypt’s Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Muslim Brotherhood ideologue and one of the most influential modern Sunni scholars, served as Hamas’ spiritual authority. Qaradawi explicitly framed the Arab-Israel conflict as a religious struggle between Islam and Judaism. Palestine is the “land of prophecy and blessing,”[23] with Islam superseding Judaism’s claim to the land. According to Qaradawi, the Qur’an recounts in great detail the stories of the Children of Israel to warn Muslims of their fundamentally corrupt and evil nature. On one hand, Arabs are descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s eldest son and the true heir to the divine promise, while Jews descend from Isaac, the younger brother. At the same time, modern Palestinians are the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, while today’s Jews are Khazars and thus unrelated to the biblical Children of Israel.
Unlike Christian supersessionism, there has yet to be a Muslim Nostra aetate. Following the October 7 massacre, Israeli rabbi Oury Cherki wrote an open letter that he sent to thousands of Islamic scholars worldwide,[24] taking the faith to task for its attitudes towards Judaism. Rabbi Cherki was eventually invited to the United Arab Emirates, where he discussed religious dialogue with senior political and religious leaders. Only time will tell whether such efforts will lead to new Islamic approaches towards Jews and Judaism.
The Pseudoscience of Erasure: Modern Secular Myths and the Khazar Hypothesis
The anti-Israel movement has adopted many of the same tropes and claims around the origins and history of the Jewish people, turning Jews into colonial interlopers while framing Palestinians as the real Israelites. This can be seen most prominently in the annual Christmas-time insistence that Jesus was a Palestinian.[25] While classical theology claims that Jews were spiritually replaced and secular myths claim that they are biological impostors, both rely on the exact same premise: that today’s Jews are ‘fake’ Jews with no valid claim to their own legacy. In this sense, modern identity erasure is simply secular supersessionism, swapping theological rejection for pseudo-scientific denial to strip the Jewish people of their historical continuity.
Although the twentieth century brought about the decline of organized religion in the Western world, the insistence that today’s Jews are impostors has found new, ostensibly scientific language. In September 2023, speaking at a Fatah conference in Ramallah, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said about the Jews: “The truth that we should clarify to the world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism. The story began in 900 CE, in the Khazar Kingdom on the Caspian Sea. It was a Tatar kingdom that converted to Judaism. [In the 11th century], this empire collapsed, and all its population fled to the north and to the west. They left for Russia and Western and Eastern Europe. There they spread, and are the forefathers of Ashkenazi Jews.”[26] The Khazar hypothesis is regularly promoted on all corners of the Internet, by progressives, neo-Nazi racists, Christian nationalists and Islamic jihadists.
According to many medieval sources, some Khazars, a Turkic people living in the northern and central Caucasus, converted to Judaism in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Khazar origin theory holds that after the collapse of the Khazar empire, the Khazars fled to Eastern Europe, where they became the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews. Although the theory was mentioned as early as 1808, it gained wider popularity with the publication of Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976.[27] Koestler, himself a Hungarian Jew, explicitly intended to weaken European antisemitism by demonstrating that Ashkenazi Jews were of European rather than Levantine ancestry. Ironically, his book found a warm reception in the Arab world for supposedly disproving a Jewish connection to Israel, as well as in neo-Nazi circles. It is often insisted, as the other side to the Khazar claim, that the Palestinian Arabs are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites.[28]
In 2009, Shlomo Sand, a historian of modern France at Tel Aviv University, wrote The Invention of the Jewish People,[29] which gave a new twist to the Khazar myth. The book, which also found a large following in the Arab world, claims that there was no exile of Jews from Israel under the Romans. Jewish communities outside Israel originate in mass conversions of local populations, as opposed to Jewish exiles from Israel. Sand calls Jewish peoplehood a modern myth invented in the nineteenth century by Jewish intellectuals influenced by German romanticism.
Another version of secular supersessionism attacks the Hebrew language as an artificial language completely disconnected from biblical Hebrew. According to this theory, Hebrew was a dead language until it was revived by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the nineteenth century. Hebrew is really a European language, or (its complete opposite) a stolen mishmash of Arabic, and Hebrew’s fake nature is proven by the fact that modern Israelis do not use “Semitic” pronunciations.
In reality, the Khazar theory has been largely debunked by modern genetic studies.[30] The genetic origins of modern Jewish populations point to a foundational ancestral root in the Levant. Large-scale genomic studies have consistently shown that, despite centuries of geographical dispersion, major Jewish diaspora groups – including Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi Jews – share a significant portion of their ancestry with ancient and modern Levantine populations. Genetic markers on the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, as well as autosomal data, reveal that these groups are often more closely related to one another and to non-Jewish Middle Easterners than to the European or North African populations among whom they lived. While historical migrations led to varying degrees of admixture with local host populations, the persistent “Levantine signature” remains a core biological link to the Iron Age Near East, reflecting the common Mediterranean origin of these communities.
Modern Hebrew was never a dead language before the nineteenth century. For centuries, religious commentary and correspondence among Jewish communities were written in Hebrew. During the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry (950-1150), both religious and secular Hebrew poetry flourished. During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jewish intellectuals adopted Hebrew as the language of modern literature. Prior to Ben-Yehuda, spoken Hebrew had developed as the lingua franca of the diverse Jewish communities in Ottoman Jerusalem. Though Modern Hebrew has incorporated loanwords from European and Arabic sources—a common trait of all evolving languages – its core grammatical structure and three-consonant root system remain consistent with Ancient Hebrew. Furthermore, the relationship between the modern and ancient forms is close enough that modern speakers can generally understand the Hebrew Bible, much as a modern English speaker can navigate Shakespeare. Ultimately, the evolution of Hebrew represents a continuous linguistic chain rather than a rupture, serving as a primary cultural and biological link for the Jewish people to their ancestral Levantine origins.[31]
The emphasis on Jewish genetic origin reflects European blood-and-soil nationalism, which claims that Jews are too racially impure to merit statehood. While modern political Zionism emerged in nineteenth-century Europe as a response to antisemitism and assimilation pressures, its foundations are deeply rooted in a spiritual, religious, and national connection to the Land of Israel spanning thousands of years. The term “Zion” – originally referring to a specific part of Jerusalem and the site of the Holy Temple – serves as a broader symbol for the city and the entire land. Jewish identity uniquely integrates religion and nationality; this collective identity is sustained by an ancient covenant, a shared destiny, and traditional customs, ranging from daily prayers for restoration to the symbolic vow “Next year in Jerusalem.” This enduring bond is anchored in both sacred scripture and the historical reality of Jewish sovereignty over the centuries before the Babylonian and Roman conquests. Furthermore, this connection is woven into the Jewish calendar itself, as the holidays and commandments (such as the Three Pilgrimage Festivals) are intrinsically tied to the agricultural cycles and seasons specific to the Land of Israel.
The Phoenix of Sovereignty: Existing on Jewish Terms
Zionism is precisely the Jewish insistence on existing on Jews’ own terms – not as prefigurations of another faith, fossilized remnants of a prior revelation, or a babel of pretenders without a shared history. For this reason, Christian, Islamic, and secular imperialists deny Jews the right to statehood. Jewish sovereignty so offends the supersessionists of many stripes because it rejects the role they have carved out for Jewish legitimacy.
Religious Jews may credit this to God’s continued adherence to His covenant with the People of Israel, while secular Jews may attribute it to more worldly causes. More than 7,000,000 Jews live in Israel, making it the largest Jewish community in the world and accounting for half of the global Jewish population. Israel has been independent for nearly eight decades, and the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews have never known any other home. Zionism testifies to the Jewish people’s commitment to renewal and rebirth. Whether viewed as the fulfillment of an ancient divine covenant or a secular triumph of the human spirit, the reestablishment of the State of Israel serves as enduring evidence of a continuous historical, cultural, and biological journey back to its ancestral Hebrew roots.
(Published in Lehrhaus, “Beyond the Shadow of Replacement: The Resilience of Jewish Identity and Covenant”, 26.10.2026)
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[1] “Tucker Confronts Mike Huckabee on America’s Toxic Relationship With Israel” (Feb. 20, 2026).
[2] Sefaria translation.
[3] Chabad.org translation.
[4] Jacob Herzog and Arnold Toynbee, Transcript of a Debate Between Mr. Yaacov Herzog, Israeli Ambassador to Canada, and Prof. Arnold Toynbee, on Arab-Israeli Relations and Israel Refugee Policy (Atlas, 1961), Herzog’s closing remarks.
[5] Religious Liberty Commission, Transcript, Fifth Hearing of the Religious Liberty Commission, Parts I & II, Testimony of Carrie Prejean Boller, U.S. Department of Justice (February 9, 2026), 27.
[6] See Mark Tooley, “We Need a New Defense of Christian Zionism,” The Dispatch (July 26, 2026).
[7] Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho (c. 155-160 CE).
[8] Tertullian, Apology, ch. 21.
[9] Augustine, Against Faustus, bk. 12, ch. 23; Augustine, City of God, bk. 18, chs. 46-47; Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 59, §§15-18; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (University of California Press, 1999); Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (Yale University Press, 2008).
[10] Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Raphael Patai (Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), vol. V, 1601–1605.
[11] See “Christian Zionism,” Britannica.
[12] Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate (Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions), (28 October 1965), para. 4.
[13] Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, “The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable” (Rom 11:29): A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic–Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate (No. 4), (10 December 2015).
[14] Qur’an, Sūrat al-Nisāʾ (4):47.
[15] See “Tahrif,” Al-Islam.org.
[16] Qur’an, Sūrat Āl ʿImrān (3):67.
[17] Qur’an, Sūrat al-Jumuʿah (62):5.
[18] Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-Qurʾān, commentary on Qurʾān 2:62, vol. 2, 40–45.
[19] Qur’an, Sūrat al-Tawbah (9):29 (trans. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran).
[20] Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, commentary on Qur’an 2:61.
[21] Hassan Ma’moun, “Speech at the Inauguration of the Fourth Conference,” in The Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research (Cairo: General Organization for Government Printing Offices, 1970), 2.
[22] Muhammad El-Sayyed Husein al-Dahabi, “Israelite Narratives in Exegesis and Tradition,” in The Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research (Cairo: General Organization for Government Printing Offices, 1970), quoted in D. F. Green, ed., Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel: Extracts from the Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research, 3rd ed. (Geneva: Editions de l’Avenir, 1976), 68.
[23] Yusuf al-Qaradawi, “Jerusalem: Land of Ribāṭ and Jihad” [Ar.], Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi website.
[24] Oury Cherki, “A Bridge between Faiths: An Open Letter to Islam, Part 1,” Noahide World Center (January 21, 2024).
[25] See, e.g., “Abbas’ Christmas speech: Jesus was “a Palestinian messenger,” Palestinian Media Watch (December 23, 2013).
[26] Ehud Yaari, “Abbas and the Khazar Claim: Separating Myth from Fact,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy (September 12, 2023).
[27] Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (Hutchinson, 1976).
[28] See, e.g., “Zionist FAQs: Genetic Distances of Modern Communities from Ancient Israelites,” PalestineRemembered.com.
[29] Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. Yael Lotan (Verso, 2009).
[30] Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, “Gene Tests Show That Two Fifths of Ashkenazi Jews Are Descended from Four Women,” BMJ 332 (2006): 140.
[31] See Lewis Glinert, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University Press, 2017).
