Brit-Am Research Sources
Contents:
1. West and Eastern Germany are Different from each Other!
It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany
BY JAMES HAWES
2. King Solomon in Spain
Was King Solomon the ancient world's first shipping magnate?
Marine archaeologist unearths evidence suggesting biblical king's riches were based on voyages he funded with Phoenician allies
by Dalya Alberge
3. Amnon Goldberg. Ulster and Bible-Values
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1. West and Eastern Germany are Different from each Other!
It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany
https://unherd.com/2019/11/there-have-always-been-two-germanys/?=refinnar
BY JAMES HAWES
Today the former East is rallying to a new Right-wing populism, but divisions between the two halves are much older than Communism
Extracts:
The founder of West Germany, Conrad Adenauer, knew his history. After the First World War he begged the French and British to help him split Prussia off from Germany. When he had to visit Berlin, he would always draw the curtains of his train compartment as he crossed the fatal River Elbe, muttering 'Here we go, Asia again!' ('Schon wieder Asien!') After the second war, though obliged in public to support re-unification, he told the British most secretly that he was determined it should never happen.
The most obvious sign that there are two countries is the confessional divide between Catholics and Lutherans. Anyone who doubts how significant that division is should just look at a map of the Nazi vote in 1932 superimposed onto a map of the Catholic population according to the 1934 census. They are, to all intents and purposes, mirror-images. [Catholics votes AGAINST THE NAZIS!]
.... The classic line between these two Germanies is the River Elbe, which the Romans thought the natural limit of Germania. Charlemagne's restored 'Roman' Empire ended there, too.
While early medieval western Europe was developing its unique signature, the power-sharing of international Church and national-state, the lands beyond the river Elbe were still populated by pagan, illiterate tribes. No real attempt was made to exert German control and settlement beyond that point until 1147; Cologne had already been a flourishing western European city for 1,200 years when the first German conqueror-farmers reached Berlin.
... East of the Elbe, the Germans never entirely supplanted the Slavs (some, the Sorbs, remain even in the truncated eastern Germany of today, just north of Dresden).
... The Germans of the east came to accept rule by a caste of warlords, the famous Prussian Junkers, and, later, the new Lutheran paradigm of a state which controlled its very own Church and against which there was hence no appeal.
Not for nothing did Friedrich Hayek see Prussia as the template for all modern totalitarian states.... Electoral maps, however, do not lie. They show that ever since Germans have had votes, eastern Germans have voted very differently from western Germans.
Under the German Empire (1871-1918), the Prussian Conservatives, conservative in this context meaning supporters of royal and militarist rule under an agrarian Junker elite, depended almost completely on votes from the East, having scarcely any traction at all in the West.
The First World War changed nothing. In the first normal elections of the Weimar Republic, the extreme Prussian conservatives of the DNVP (officially anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, violently antidemocratic, their members implicated in several high-profile political murders) were the second largest party nationally but ... that position was entirely dependent on votes from the East.
And when the deluge finally came in 1933 it was, again, only thanks to heavy votes in the East that Hitler got 43.9% nationally, enabling him... to seize power by semi-constitutional means. If the whole country had voted like the Rhineland or Munich, he could only have attempted an armed coup, which the Army would have crushed.
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2. King Solomon in Spain
Was King Solomon the ancient world,s first shipping magnate?
Marine archaeologist unearths evidence suggesting biblical king's riches were based on voyages he funded with Phoenician allies
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/25/was-king-solomon-the-ancient-worlds-first-shipping-magnate
by
Dalya Alberge
Sun 25 Apr 2021
Extracts:
King Solomon is venerated in Judaism and Christianity for his wisdom and in Islam as a prophet, but the fabled ruler is one of the Bible's great unsolved mysteries.
Archaeologists have struggled in vain to find conclusive proof that he actually existed. With no inscriptions or remnants of the magnificent palace and temple he is supposed to have built in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, the Israelite king has sunk into the realm of myth.
Now British marine archaeologist Dr Sean Kingsley has amassed evidence showing that Solomon was not only a flesh-and-blood monarch but also the world's first shipping magnate, who funded voyages carried out by his Phoenician allies in 'history's first special relationship.
Over 10 years, Kingsley has carried out a maritime audit of 'the Solomon question'. By extending the search beyond the Holy Land, across the Mediterranean to Spain and Sardinia, he found that archaeological evidence supports biblical descriptions of a partnership between Solomon, who 'excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom', and the Phoenician king Hiram, who 'supplied Solomon with cedar timber and gold, as much as he desired'.
Kingsley told the Observer: 'I've spread a very wide net. That kind of maritime study has never been done before.'
He said: 'For 100 years, archaeologists have scrutinised Jerusalem's holy soils, the most excavated city in the world. Nothing definitive fits the book of Kings, and Chronicles, epic accounts of Solomon's palace and temple. By exploring traces of ports, warehouses, industry and shipwrecks, new evidence shakes up the quest for truth.'
He explored Andalusian port towns from Mezquitilla to Malaga and found that the archaeological evidence reveals 'a Phoenician coast'. He visited the site of the great mine of the ancient world, Rio Tinto - 70km inland from Huelva - which produced gold, silver, lead, copper and zinc, and where, crucially, he realised that old maps and historical accounts referred to a particular spot as Cerro Solomon or Solomon's Hill.
One 17th-century account notes that Solomon;s Hill was previously called Solomon;s Castle, and another describes people being ;sent there by King Solomon for gold and silver;.
Rio Tinto mining park in Huelva, Spain. Ancient accounts reveal that silver mined here came from a spot called ;Solomon;s Hill;.
At the site, archaeologists have found ancient mining tools, such as granite pestles and stone mortars used to crush minerals, and remnants of lead slag that held a high proportion of silver. Kingsley said that lead isotope analysis has shown that silver hoards excavated in Israel originally came from Iberia.
Recent digs in nearby Huelva have found evidence of the Israelites and Phoenicians, including elephant tusks, merchants; shekel weights and pottery. The Near Eastern link can be dated as far back as 930BC, the end of Solomon;s reign, and Kingsley has concluded that Huelva is ;the best fit for the capital of the biblical Tarshish;, the ancient source of imported metals, which archaeologists have ;signposted wildly;, everywhere from southern Israel to the Red Sea, Ethiopia to Tunisia.
He was struck by texts and ruins that support a ;far more conclusive candidate; in this area of the southern Iberian Peninsula, which was known in antiquity as Tartessos, a Greek derivation of Tarshish. A Phoenician script on a ninth-century BC stele found in Sardinia refers to the land of Tarshish, also proving its historical reality.
Solomon is believed to have built the First Temple of Jerusalem on the Temple Mount. Kingsley writes that everything historians know about it comes from the Bible, including details such as its inner sanctum lined with pure gold: ;Building cities, palaces and a flagship temple didn;t come cheap. Long-distance voyages to the lands of Ophir and Tarshish brought a river of gold, silver, precious stones and marble to the royal court.
;Neither Israel nor Lebanon could tap into local gold and silver resources. The biblical entrepreneurs were forced to look to the horizon. The land of Tarshish was a vital source for Solomon;s silver. As the Book of Ezekiel recorded: ;Tarshish did business with you because of your great wealth of goods.'
Kingsley added: 'What turned up in southern Spain is undeniable. Phoenician signature finds, richly strewn from Rio Tinto to Malaga, leave no doubt that Near Eastern ships voyaged to what must have seemed the far side of the moon by 900BC.
'When I spotted in ancient accounts the name of the hill where silver was mined at Rio Tinto. Solomon's Hill, I was stunned. Biblical history, archaeology and myth merged to reveal the long-sought land of Tarshish celebrated in the Old Testament.
'It looks like Solomon was wise in his maritime planning. He bankrolled the voyages from Jerusalem and let salty Phoenician sailors take all the risks at sea.'
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3. Amnon Goldberg.
Ulster and Bible-Values
"Weathering the storm" (JT 21 April) about the Northern Ireland Jewish community reminded one of how the Northern Irish Protestant Loyalist community are generally pro-Israel, their supporters disavow the dogma of Papal Infallibility, they insist that Creationism be taught in the school curriculum as an alternative to Evolution, and they oppose abortion and same-gender marriage.
If the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, which the worldwide Orange Order commemorate with an undying fervor with their famous marches every year, had gone the other way and the Catholic James II had defeated the Protestant William III, the history of the Emerald Isle would have been very different. During WW2, the Republic of Eire remained neutral to Germany, whist Ulster fought against it. Without its Belfast and Londonderry ports, its Harland and Wolff shipyards and its Shorts aircraft factories, the British would have lost the war: "Northern Ireland is as much a part of the United Kingdom as is my own constituency of Finchley!" (PM Margaret Thatcher 1982). In the unlikely but not inconceivable scenario that conflict should ever occur with Eire, even though the Loyalists are in total outnumbered 6 to 1, they are so proficient that it is believed that they could capture the entire island in days, even without help from the UK mainland!
Loyalists incorporate a 'Star of David' in their flag, maintaining that the "Red Hand" glyph inside the star harks back to the red thread around the hand of Zerach the son of Yehudah (Breishis 38), claiming ancestry from Zerach's son Chalkol (I Divrei Hayomim 2:6), who sailed from Egypt to Spain, where he founded the city of Zaragossa, and from there to Ireland where he found "Ulladh" - related to the Hebrew "Eladah" (ibid 7:20) - the origin of "Ulster" (known to the Romans as "Ultona")!
Belief in an ancient Israelite origin was widely spread among the Scotch and Irish of Ulster and is considered to have been a formative element in their culture; see "The Tribes - The Israelite origins of Western Peoples" (2012) and "Ancestry: The Hebrew Identity of Celtic Races" (2015) by Yair Davidiy, Jerusalem.