Three decades ago, in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, entire neighborhoods of Tehran’s moneyed Jewish community fled to Los Angeles. Now, having amassed American-style fortunes and political clout, the Persians of Beverly Hills are living the ultimate California dream. Even before the revolution, a few Iranian Jews had already decamped to California. Jimmy Delshad, who made local history in 2007 by becoming the first Iranian-American mayor of Beverly Hills, left modest origins in Shiraz in 1959 and attended California State University at Northridge with his brothers. “I don’t think there were more than 10 or 12 [Persian] families we knew in Los Angeles.” Although dispossessed, the thousands of Iranian Jews who flocked to Beverly Hills in the coming years had assets most immigrants lack: advanced education, business experience and, in the majority of cases, some cash in overseas accounts. Iranian Jews also landed in Israel and New York, and it’s worth noting that the mass flight away from theocracy included Muslims and members of other religious minorities. But entire neighborhoods of Tehran’s Jewish elite settled in Beverly Hills something like a wholesale transplant of a social community. Initially the shell-shocked refugees found solace in local synagogues, where older members remembered the influx from Europe after World War II and welcomed them. Sympathies grew strained, however, by the differences in language and custom between the Ashkenazi Jewish community and the Sephardic newcomers. By American standards, Persian decorum at synagogue was freewheeling, even disruptive, as family members rose to greet one another and chat during services.
The present-day elite Persian community in Beverly Hills, got its start in the early Seventies, when four brothers of the Mahboubi clan who had grown rich at home from their virtual monopoly on chewing gum moved to Los Angeles and sank their money into real estate on Rodeo Drive. One of the brothers, Dar Mahboubi, backed haberdasher Bijan during the Eighties, and younger Mahboubis continue to manage the family’s considerable property holdings. Another group of brothers, the Yadegars, also arrived in Beverly Hills before the revolution and began snapping up real estate. Today so many Persians own stakes in Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle, the prime streets between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, that the area is known to some as “Tehrangeles.” (Another Persian shopping district in Westwood has also earned that moniker.)
The area’s attractions were obvious: Beverly Hills was synonymous with wealth and status, plus it delivered a beautiful climate, safe residential neighborhoods and a well-established Jewish community. But perhaps the key asset was the then top-notch school system. Sam Nazarian’s sister-in-law, former psychology professor Angella Nazarian, recalls that her father bought a house here in the early Seventies so her brother could attend Beverly Hills High School. “My father had no plans of coming to the U.S.,” she says over a lunch of tuna tartare in Westwood. “It was more ‘This way my son can go to a really good school.’”
Later in the decade, as Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers denounced the freedoms that had enabled Jewish prosperity, some in Tehran began to worry, says prominent hostess Mahroo Moghavem, whose husband was a successful appliance distributor at that time. “We thought investment in other countries would be good,” she says during a brunch with friends at her home in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. “We were happy, but we thought that one day the Shah would pass away and what would happen then?”
As armed students took to the streets of Tehran in late 1978, the Moghavems whisked their children off to Los Angeles for a vacation. Events unfolding on television made clear that they would not be returning home. The Moghavems were among the lucky ones, however. Thanks to their investments outside of Iran, they were able to buy a house in Beverly Hills from billionaire John Kluge and then sink money into a development project parceling the estate of silent-screen star Harold Lloyd into a 16-home subdivision.
These days Nazarian hardly needs an introduction in Hollywood and Beverly Hills: At 33, he has built an empire that includes trendy nightclubs, an archipelago of restaurants and the flashy SLS Hotel, with further hotels planned for Miami and Las Vegas. His circle, however, extends well beyond the celebutantes courted by his businesses. Nazarian and his family, who like many Iranian Jews left Tehran during the 1979 revolution, are leaders of a powerful Persian Jewish elite in Beverly Hills. One hint of the community’s influence in Los Angeles is a framed commendation on Nazarian’s sitting room wall from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “I was one of his first supporters,” explains Nazarian. “We’re very, very close.” The interior decor of Sam Nazarian’s $18.9 million mansion high above the Sunset Strip might be described as nightlife moderne. Glossy stone floors and glass walls are set off by glam touches like a Roy Lichtenstein print—This Must Be the Place, cheekily hung in the bathroom and a black crystal chandelier. But what’s inside the Nazarian house is secondary to the view: the city of Los Angeles spread like a vast Persian carpet laid at Nazarian’s feet. It is, in more ways than one, a view from the top.
Not so many years ago, Nazarian, whose family arrived in the U.S. when he was three, was taunted at Beverly Hills High School with insults such as “camel jockey.” “It wasn’t a very welcoming group of people,” he recalls of his schoolmates. Nazarian’s courtly 78-year-old father, Younes, who today sits alongside his youngest son at a table laden with crystal bowls of dates, berries, cucumbers and other refreshments—a typical display of Persian hospitality—was a successful tool-and-dye manufacturer in Iran. But in fleeing his country’s political turmoil, he had to leave most of his assets behind, arriving at a run-down hotel in Santa Monica with, as Younes recalls, “four suitcases and four children.” (The Nazarians are now part owners of the hotel.)
Younes and his brother, Parviz, relied on contacts with other Persian Jewish immigrants, “Our best asset in this country was our few friends,” he notes and established a factory building machine parts for such clients as the Department of Defense. Several years later, the brothers were brought into a fledgling telecom company, Qualcomm, and their millions ballooned into billions. Now Younes, like his son, is leaving footprints all over Los Angeles: He is chairman of his son’s business, SBE, and he serves on boards at the Rand Center for Middle East Policy and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in addition to being a major donor to the University of Southern California. This philanthropic spirit makes Younes something of a pioneer, notes Sam, since the older generation by and large has not adopted the American ethic and tax strategy of giving money to nonprofits.
A different all-American motto, however, has been fully embraced by the Nazarians and many other Persian families who have earned fortunes here: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Parviz became famous in his community and notorious in Beverly Hills for building a mansion that exemplifies an architectural style known in these parts as Persian Palace. From the street, the Nazarian pile looks like a particularly frothy wedding cake propped up by a forest of fluted columns. The interior, according to visitors, is an extravaganza of polished marble, sweeping staircases and gilt rococo furniture, a nominally French style favored by Iran’s late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. (A famous story recalls Bill Clinton’s visit to the Nazarian home for a fundraiser: He supposedly remarked, “This makes me realize I really do live in government housing.”)
In addition, Persians didn’t understand that American-style membership in a prestigious synagogue like Sinai Temple meant paying annual dues and getting involved with fundraising. “The other members looked at them as freeloaders coming and taking but never contributing,” he explains.
Delshad proved to be a major force in bridging these antipathies when, after 12 years of campaigning, he was elected in 1999 as Sinai’s first Sephardic president. He insists that tensions have since eased and notes that Persians today account for approximately 25 percent of membership. (They constitute 20 percent of the overall population of Beverly Hills.)
In 2003 Delshad took a leave from the technology company he started in 1978 to run for the Beverly Hills City Council. Ironically, he recalls, some of the toughest votes to get were Persian: Iranian Jews had no experience voting under the Shah and were wary of joining any bureaucratic roster, even the Beverly Hills voting rolls. Delshad nonetheless prevailed and in 2007 was elected mayor, despite a major kerfuffle over municipal election ballots printed in English, Spanish and, for the first time, sinuous Farsi script. “I had nothing to do with that,” Delshad insists. (Federal law does require that non-English-speaking voting blocs be provided with ballots in their own language.) “But the way they did it was to put the Persian bigger than the English,” he says. “It looked like a Farsi restaurant menu. Hundreds of people called the city to object.”
The outcry over the ballot which made the front page of The Wall Street Journal was an eruption of tensions that had been simmering for decades. A complaint sounded by Beverly Hills old-timers was that the Persians could be clannish, self-segregating and indifferent to the established norms of the community they were entering. There is some truth to that charge, acknowledges Angella Nazarian. Thanks to their wealth and numbers, Persians didn’t need to adapt. Instead, they developed a self-sufficient Farsi-speaking enclave, complete with grocery stores, restaurants and even taxi services. And rather than courting the local social establishment, rich Persians stuck to their own social world, which revolved around lavish 1,000-person bar mitzvahs and weddings. “My mother really doesn’t need to speak English, although she does,” says Nazarian. “Cultural preservation is one part of the experience of being displaced, and as with any immigrant community, we naturally want to associate with one another. Middle Eastern countries also tend to be very tribal.”
Today many younger members of the Persian community favor a less ornate style and in this as well as in many more-important matters—they represent a generational pivot between the Persian Jewish community’s past in Tehran and its future in Los Angeles. Thirty-six-year-old Natasha Baradaran, an L.A.-born and -bred interior designer whose husband, Bob, is the only Persian partner at white-shoe law firm Greenberg Glusker, is a prime example. “Especially for women, the revolution was the best thing that could have happened,” says Natasha, who earned a master’s degree in international relations at Columbia University before choosing a more creative career path. “It was hard for a lot of people who lost everything. But their kids—we learned that the sky is the limit.” Less insular and more civic-minded than their elders, these young parents, professionals and entrepreneurs represent some of America’s wealthiest and most educated immigrant offspring. The time has clearly come—as politicians, savvy businesspeople and charity fundraisers have realized to meet the neighbors in Beverly Hills.
In his office above Wilshire Boulevard, architect Hamid Gabbay, 66, traces the dazzling success of the Persian community in Beverly Hills back to Tehran before the revolution. The Sixties and Seventies saw a full-tilt economic expansion, fueled by the Shah’s dream of westernization and financed by vast oil reserves. “The real-estate boom was incredible,” explains Gabbay, who founded an architecture firm with his brother in Tehran. “We got to design a city projects I can’t even dream of now.”
The country’s Jewish minority thrived, at least in Tehran’s educated quarters, thanks to the Shah’s official policy of religious tolerance and cultural openness. But radical Muslim clerics gained strength during the late Seventies, and in January 1979 they overthrew the ailing monarch. Gabbay left in November 1978, landing a job with an L.A. firm that he had been interviewing to work for him just four months earlier. “I went to the firm,” he recalls, “and said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hire you. But would you hire me?’”
Even before the revolution, a few Iranian Jews had already decamped to California. Jimmy Delshad, who made local history in 2007 by becoming the first Iranian-American mayor of Beverly Hills, left modest origins in Shiraz in 1959 and attended California State University at Northridge with his brothers. “I don’t think there were more than 10 or 12 [Persian] families we knew in Los Angeles,” he says.
The present-day elite Persian community in Beverly Hills, though, really got its start in the early Seventies, when four brothers of the Mahboubi clan, who had grown rich at home from their virtual monopoly on chewing gum moved to Los Angeles and sank their money into real estate on Rodeo Drive.
One of the brothers, Dar Mahboubi, backed haberdasher Bijan during the Eighties, and younger Mahboubis continue to manage the family’s considerable property holdings. Another group of brothers, the Yadegars, also arrived in Beverly Hills before the revolution and began snapping up real estate. Today so many Persians own stakes in Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle, the prime streets between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, that the area is known to some as “Tehrangeles.” (Another Persian shopping district in Westwood has also earned that moniker.)
Generational shift, slow though it may be, has pushed the Persian community toward the American mainstream or at least the Beverly Hills version of it. Still, the community clings tightly to its core values of respect for family, faith, education and success, and some age-old customs remain. Friday-night Shabbat dinners are sacrosanct, and the meal can easily include 60 people. (Persians often cite such gatherings as a reason they need large houses.) Likewise, a majority in the younger generation choose to marry fellow Persians, much to their parents’ relief. “They don’t have to marry Persian,” says Jasmine Yadegar, in a tone suggesting that she hopes her two twentysomething daughters—both of whom still live at home, eventually will. “All I want for them is to be happy and find people with the same background.”
“For me,” says daughter Sabrina, an aspiring fashion designer, “I think it’s a lot easier to fall in love with someone who has the same ideas and experiences.”
“I need to love their family, and they need to love mine,” adds older sister Jessica, a documentary filmmaker. “Some of my American friends have told me that you’re not dating the parents. They say you don’t need to meet the parents on the first, second or third date. That’s not my view. I think the longer you postpone the introduction to the family, the longer it takes you to get to know if this is someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.”
Among much older women, the Iranian custom of the doreh—a semiformal circle of women who meet to eat home-cooked Persian fare, play cards and gossip in Farsi has also proved resilient enough to make it to the 21st century. But whether the tradition survives two generations in America is an open question as women’s roles change. “The younger generation works more,” says grandmother Jacqueline Moradi during the brunch gathering at Moghavem’s house. “In our generation in Iran, that was unheard of.”
The Baradarans represent this new face of the Persian upper-middle class. Natasha, who has a busy career, doesn’t attend a doreh, and Bob shares the job of raising their two young daughters. The Baradarans’ circle not only includes Persian friends but also his colleagues, her clients and other parents from the girls’ prestigious private schools. “I am raising kids in a city in which I was raised,” says Natasha. “This is my home. I don’t feel like a transplant.” And why should she? After 30 years in Beverly Hills, few, if any, Persians still hope to return to Tehran. “It’s a reality,” says Gabbay of his community’s new life in California, as he gazes out his office window at the Golden Triangle. “We are a reality.”
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Shiloh was where the Holy Sanctuary was located prior to the Jerusalem Holy Temple. It is first mentioned in the Book of Joshua, which also states that the Holy Sanctuary was built there and stood for about 400 years during the era of the Judges. In the Book of Samuel, Shiloh is mentioned as a religious center, where Elkana and his family go to give sacrifices to G-d. During that pilgrimage, Elkana’s wife, Hana, asks G-d to give her a son and eventually gives birth to Samuel the Prophet.
Shiloh is believed by researchers to have fallen into ruin after the Israelites’ unsuccessful war with the Philistines, in which the enemy took the Holy Ark captive. The Ark was soon returned to Israel, but was never brought back to Shiloh. Instead, it was taken to Kiryat Yearim until King David had it delivered to Jerusalem.
Archaeological findings indicate that a Jewish presence continued at Shiloh until the year 722 BCE, when the Kingdom of Israel was defeated by Assyria. According to the Book of Judges and the Mishna, unwed Jewish women traditionally went to the vineyards of Shiloh to dance on Tu B’Av.
Shiloh is north of Beit El, Israel, where the excavations are currently being carried out under the auspices of the Archaeological Staff Officer for Judea and Samaria in the IDF Civilian Administration Antiquities Unit and the Binyamin local authority.
The following photos reveal the artefacts discovered and the archaelogists at work in Shiloh.
The Biblical Israelites (also referred to as the Twelve Tribes or Children of Israel) were the descendants of the Biblical patriarch Jacob, who also bore the name Israel.
The term Israelite is derived from Israel (Yisrael meaning “persevere with God”), the name given to Jacob after wrestling with an angel on the shores of the Jabbok. (Genesis 32:28-29). The verse explains the name as a combination of the Hebrew “yisra,” to prevail, over “ayl,” the divine, hence “Yisrael” or “Israel.” His descendants are called the House of Jacob, the Children of Israel, the nation of Israel, or the Israelites.
The Hebrew Bible is mainly concerned with the Israelites. According to it, the Land of Israel was promised to them by God. Jerusalem was their capital and the site of the temple at the center of their religion.
The Israelites became a local political power with the United Monarchy of Kings Saul, David and Solomon, from c. 1025 BCE. Zedekiah, king of Judah (597-586 BCE), is considered the last king from the House of David.
In modern Hebrew Bnei Yisrael can denote the Israelite people at any time in history and is typically used to emphasize Judaism religious identity.
From the period of Mishna (but probably used before that period) the term Yisraeli acquired an additional narrower meaning of Jews of legitimate birth other than Levites and Aaronite priests (kohanim). In modern usage, the term Yisrael (“an Israel”) is used in a non-adjectival form to refer to such a person. In modern Hebrew, the term Yisraeli is used to refer to a citizen of the modern State of Israel, regardless of religion or ethnicity and is translated into English as “Israeli”.
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In the Hebrew Bible the Israelites are referred to as the children of Israel, and by other, similar expressions. The Hebrew Bible traces the historic and spiritual progress of this family. The family’s forefather was Israel, whose name originally was Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons and an unknown number of daughters.
His twelve sons were:
The first eleven of Jacob’s sons were born in Haran before the return of the family to Canaan, where Benjamin was born. When Joseph was 17 years old, some of his brothers sold him into slavery, and he ended up being viceroy of Egypt. Then, some 20 years later, when famine had ravaged Canaan, Joseph persuaded his father, Jacob, to come with his entire family, which then numbered 70, and settle in Egypt. The Tribes of Israel: In Egypt, the children of Israel (or Hebrews, as the Egyptians called them) prospered and grew in numbers. They maintained strong family and clan affiliations, described as “houses”. These family affiliations were traced to one of the sons of Israel. These “houses” are translated into English as “tribes”, although the divisions were not small isolated distinct ethnic groups in the modern sense of the term. In Hebrew, they are called a shevet or a mateh, meaning literally a “staff” or “rod”.
Although the popular convention is to refer to the Israelites as comprising twelve tribes, by reference to Jacob’s twelve sons, in fact the number of tribes was thirteen. This is because the two children of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, were adopted by Jacob (Israel) as his own, and their descendants are counted as separate tribes. (Genesis 48:5-6)
Some English-speaking Jewish groups regard the pronunciation, English transcription and Hebrew spelling of the tribal names as extremely important. The transcriptions and spellings are as follows:
Following the Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites were divided into thirteen camps (Hebrew: machanot). Thus additionally Aaron and his descendants although descended from Levi were appointed as priests (kohanim) and came to be considered a separate division to the Levites.
According to importance with Levi in the center of the encampment around the Tabernacle and its furnishings surrounded by other tribes arranged in four groups:
During this period, the Kenizzites (thought by some to be identical to the Edomite clan of Kenaz) are seen to form part of Judah. The Kenites (the Midianite clan headed by Moses’ father in law, Jethro) also joined the Israelites.
Following the conquest of Canaan by Moses and Joshua, the Israelite tribes were allotted tribal territories. Moses allotted territories on land east of the Jordan to the tribes of Reuben, Gad and a portion of Manasseh, which they had requested. (Numbers 32:5) As the conquest continued, Joshua allotted territories to the tribes of Judah, Ephraim and the rest of Manasseh on land west of the Jordan, which they had conquered.
The tribe of Manasseh was considered as two half-tribes, separated by the Jordan River, with the part laying east of the Jordan being referred to as the half-tribe of Manasseh in Gilead. [The Jordanian Kingdom today are likely Manasseh]
After the conquest of the remainder of Canaan, Joshua assigned territories to the tribes of Asher, Benjamin, Dan, Issacher, Naphtali, Simeon and Zebulun. The land of Judah was considered too large for that tribe alone and Simeon was assigned a portion within the land of Judah instead of its own territory in the newly conquered land. The Kenites also settled in the territory of Judah and their descendants were subsequently incorporated into that tribe.
Because the Levites, and kohanim (descendants of Aaron) played a special religious role of service at the Tabernacle to the people, they were not given territories, but were instead assigned cities within the other territories.
Joshua had made a pact with the Canaanite inhabitants of Gibeon who instead of being conquered in battle became a separate ethnic group called the Nethinim, being given the role of maintenance of the tabernacle and in later centuries the Temple.
The tribes of Dan had originally been assigned territory laying between the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh but during the period of the Judges they were displaced by a war with the Amorites and subsequently settled in territory to the north of the tribes of Naphtali.
Israelite confederation: From after the conquest of the land by Joshua until the formation of the first Kingdom of Israel in c. 1050 BCE, the Israelite tribes formed a loose confederation. No central government existed, and in times of crisis the people were led by ad hoc leaders known as Judges.
With the growth of the threat from Philistine incursions, the Israelite tribes decided to form a strong centralised monarchy to meet the challenge. The first king of this new entity was Saul, who came from the Tribe of Benjamin, (1 Samuel 9:1-2) which at the time was the smallest of the tribes.
United monarchy: The Israelites united in about 1050 BCE to form the United Kingdom of Israel under Saul. At this time the tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh in Gilead expanded their territory eastwards, conquering and absorbing the Hagrites (the people of Jetur, Naphish, and Nodab who were an offshoot of the Ishmaelites). Under Solomon the remaining Canaanites in the land became the division known as the Avdei Shlomo (Servants of Solomon) and were counted as part of the Nethinim.
During David’s and Solomon’s reigns, the Kingdom of Israel is considered to have reached the limits of the borders of the Land of Israel promised to Abraham’s, Isaac’s, and Jacob’s descendants in Genesis; however, David and Solomon maintained actual government jurisdiction only over the Israelite tribes, although they received tribute from the vaster region defined by these borders.
Northern and southern kingdoms
The Kingdom of Israel split in c. 930 BCE to form the southern Kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel:
The southern Kingdom of Judah comprised the tribes of Judah, Simeon and Benjamin together with the Aaronite kohanim, Levites and Nethinim who lived amongst them.
The northern Kingdom of Israel comprised the tribes of Reuben, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim, both divisions of Manasseh and the remainder of the Levites. The territory of Simeon had from the start fallen within the territory of Judah (see above) and with inclusion of Benjamin in the southern kingdom the designation “Judah” came to include Benjamin as well.
As the Levites and kohanim did not have their own territories, the Book of Kings describes the southern kingdom as consisting of one tribe (i.e. Judah, but including Simeon and Benjamin) and the northern kingdom as consisting of ten tribes (i.e. Reuben, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim, (western) Manasseh and (eastern) Manasseh in Gilead).
Later after Jeroboam attempted to establish rival centers of worship to Jerusalem with lay priests, the Levites of the northern kingdom abandoned the northern kingdom and came to Judah (2 Chronicles 11:14 ).
Fall of Northern kingdom: The Assyrian king Tiglath-Pilesar attacked the northern kingdom of Israel, driving the tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh in Gilead out of the desert outposts of Jetur, Naphish and Nodab and conquering their territories. People from these tribes, including the Reubenite leader, were taken captive and resettled in the region of the Habor river system. Tiglath-Pilesar also captured the territory of Naphtali and the city of Janoah in Ephraim, and an Assyrian governor was placed over the region of Naphtali.
The remainder of the northern kingdom was conquered by Sargon II, who captured the capital city Samaria in the territory of Ephraim. He took 27,290 people captive from the city of Samaria resettling some with the Israelites in the Habor region and the rest in the land of the Medes thus establishing Israelite communities in Ecbatana and Rages.
The Book of Tobit additionally records that Sargon had taken other captives from the northern kingdom to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, in particular Tobit from the town of Thisbe in Naphtali.
In medieval Rabbinic stories, the concept of the ten tribes who were taken away from the House of David (who continued the rule of the southern kingdom of Judah) becomes confounded with accounts of the Assyrian deportations, leading to the teaching of the “Ten Lost Tribes”. The recorded history differs from this teaching: No record exists of the Assyrians having exiled people from Dan, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, or western Manasseh.
Descriptions of the deportation of people from Reuben, Gad, Manasseh in Gilead, Ephraim, and Naphtali indicate that only a portion of these tribes were deported, and the places to which they were deported are known locations given in the accounts. The deported communities are mentioned as still existing at the time of the composition of the books of Kings and Chronicles and did not disappear by assimilation.
2 Chr 30:1-11 explicitly mentions northern Israelites who had been spared by the Assyrians, in particular the people of Dan, Ephraim, Manasseh, Asher, and Zebulun, and how members of the latter three tribes returned to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem during the reign of Hezekiah.
With the Kingdom of Judah remaining as the sole Israelite kingdom, the term Yehudi (Jew), originally the adjective of the name Yehudah (Judah), came to include all the Israelite people.
Southern kingdom: In 597 BCE the Babylonian king Nebuchanezzar sacked Jerusalem and exiled 3,023 Jews to Babylon (Jeremiah 52:28). He additionally exiled many (non-Jewish) workers, taking a total of around 10,000 people captive (2 Kings 24:14).
In 586 BCE he conquered the southern kingdom, deposing the king, destroyed the Temple and left Jerusalem in ruins. He took a further 832 Jews captive from Jerusalem (Jeremiah 52:29). Although ending the kingdom he allowed Judah a measure of self rule, appointing Gedaliah as Jewish governor of the region.
Gedaliah was later assassinated by members of the royal family who saw him as a usurper, which resulted in punitive action by Nebuchadnezzar in which a further 745 Jews were exiled to Babylon. In total 4600 Jews had been exiled to Babylon (Jeremiah 52:30).
Towns in Judah from which people had fled or been taken captive during the invasions of the Babylonians were resettled by Jews from the former northern kingdom of Israel, as well as Levites, Aaronite kohanim and Nethinim (1 Chronicles 9:2).
Jerusalem was resettled by members of the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, Ephraim and Manasseh (1 Chronicles 9:3).
Second Temple period: The exiles were allowed to return in 538 BCE, after the fall of Babylon to the Persians and Medes. Substantial returns of descendants of exiles took place in 444 BCE under Nehemiah and in c. 400 BCE under Ezra.
Genealogy after the exile: As a result of the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions most Israelites lost written records tracing their ancestry. Those who could still prove their ancestry included Levites, Aaronite kohanim, Nethinim including Avdei Shlomo and members of clans that had been part of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. With time, knowledge of descent from these clans of Judah and Benjamin was also lost although there are descendants of the royal House of David (part of Judah) who have maintained knowledge of their ancestry to modern times.
The Israelite community following the Babylonian captivity was divided into ten lineages and Ezra established strict rules concerning permissible marriages between the lineages:
The assumption is Kohanim, were not allowed to intermarry. Levites, Israelites, chalalim, proselytes and freedmen were allowed to intermarry. Mamzerim, Nethinim, shetukim and foundlings were allowed to intermarry. In the case of intermarriage between Levites and Israelites, the children took the father’s lineage, more complex rules governed the lineage of other intermarriages. With time some of these lineages disappeared: for example the descendants of the original freedmen became part of the other lineages according to the rules of intermarriage; the Nethinim are no longer found after the persecutions and massacres carried out by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes.
Loss of proof of descent also affected neighbouring peoples, such as the Moabites and Ammonites, and resulted in renunciation of the ancient prohibitions on the conversions of these people to Judaism as well as of the Edomites.
It is alleged that under the Hasmonean dynasty all were forcibly converted to Judaism. Arabian (Nabatean) groups, such as the Zabadeans and Itureans, were also conquered and forcefully converted, as were the mixed peoples of the former Philistine cities. Under the Hasmonean kings, the Israelites were reunited with their closest relatives, the remnants of the Moabites, Ammonites and Edomites after thousands of years of separation. This would mean that the aforementioned and Arabs were converts to Judaism.
The large proselyte groups were assimilated into the Israelite lineage by the second half of the second century CE. The chalalim, mamzerim, shetukim, and foundlings were by their nature small groups of people. The major divisions thus became:
Kohanim Levites Israelites This threefold division of the Jewish people persists to this day. To avoid confusion with the broader use of the term Israelite or the modern term Israeli, a member of the Israelite, as opposed to Levite or Aaronite, lineage is usually referred to as a Yisrael (an Israel) and not a Yisraeli (which could mean Israelite in the broader sense or in modern Hebrew, an Israeli).
