ABOUT LANGUAGE, WEXLER, AND HODGE-PODGE SCHOLARSHIP

A correspondent brings two writings to my attention, both of which have titles and content which must be considered disturbing, at the very least.


The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity
By Paul Wexler

The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews
By Paul Wexler

[Paul Wexler is a professor of linguistics at Tel-Aviv University. Using linguistic analysis he makes the argument in the first book that Ashkenazim are of non-Jewish origin, in the second, and by the same method, that Sephardim are the descendants of Berbers converted to Judaism. This per internet mentions of these books.]

Do any of my readers know about these books? Have you read them? What do others say about these books and their author?

I would really appreciate your feedback.

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I myself have not read either book. And, in that I ab initio take issue with both their contentions, and the ideology which would support them and be supported by them, it is incredibly unlikely that I would spend any money on either of these 'scholarly tomes'.
[I do not wish to enrich Paul Wexler.]

I doubt, I sincerely and thoroughly doubt, that the language one speaks must provide evidence of one's origin.
Consider the millions of Americans who by that evidence would be judged the descendants of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Or the hundreds of thousands of lawyers who then are clearly the distant relatives of Norman rapists and mediaeval French clerics. And the numerous groups all over Europe who, despite the names of their towns and provinces, are not Flemish, not Italian, not German, but French, Greek, and Slav.

To say nothing of the large number of pure Chinese and pure Polynesian (Melanesian) people in parts of Asia and the South Pacific who, evidently, are naught but Indonesians of odd appearance.

Among others. Among several many others.


I myself am of praedominantly Dutch ancestry, mixed with English and Scots-Irish.
I defy anyone to find conclusive proof of that in the language I use on this blog, or in my daily speech. Nor will they find any linguistic trace of the American Indian hidden deep in the family woodpile (who, I assume and hope, at least decently learned the New Jersey Dutch spoken by their glow-in-the-dark significant other). To say nothing of the Czechs and Slavs in one of the family pneumatophores.

Savage Kitten, as readers of this blog may have figured out, is of Cantonese extraction. There is not a trace of the proto-Thai some of her ancestors spoke a millennium ago in the American English she speaks and writes.
[Note: the Cantonese are considered to be in a significant part descendants of non-Chinese who were Sinified/Sinicized during the T'ang and Sung periods.]

In fact, judging by some terms which crop up in her daily speech, she is a former resident of Amsterdam pining keenly for the raw herring available at Van Altena's fishstand outside the Rijks Museum, whereas I am obviously an Indonesian Jew, and several of my friends are members of Monty Python's Flying Circus, or refugees from a Coen Brothers movie.

Please comment liberally.
Thank you.