Brit-Am Historical Reports (16 August, 2013, Elul 10, 5773)
Contents:
1. Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis
2. Origin of copper ores of Nordic Bronze Age [North Tyrol, Ibernian Peninsula, Sardinia]
3. Climate, Not Spaniards, Brought Diseases That Killed Aztecs
4. Germans Responsible for Imagery Associating Jews with Swine
5. Pope Pius -12 was an accessory to  the Kidnapping of Jewish Children
6. Dutch Government (1949) Forced at Least 358 Jewish Infants to Become Gentiles!
7. Was there a Jewish temple in ancient Egypt?
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1. Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis
http://dienekes.blogspot.co.il/
David Kaniewski et al.
The Late Bronze Age world of the Eastern Mediterranean, a rich linkage of Aegean, Egyptian, Syro-Palestinian, and Hittite civilizations, collapsed famously 3200 years ago and has remained one of the mysteries of the ancient world since the event's retrieval began in the late 19th century AD/CE. Iconic Egyptian bas-reliefs and graphic hieroglyphic and cuneiform texts portray the proximate cause of the collapse as the invasions of the 'Peoples-of-the-Sea' at the Nile Delta, the Turkish coast, and down into the heartlands of Syria and Palestine where armies clashed, famine-ravaged cities abandoned, and countrysides depopulated. Here we report palaeoclimate data from Cyprus for the Late Bronze Age crisis, alongside a radiocarbon-based chronology integrating both archaeological and palaeoclimate proxies, which reveal the effects of abrupt climate change-driven famine and causal linkage with the Sea People invasions in Cyprus and Syria. The statistical analysis of proximate and ultimate features of the sequential collapse reveals the relationships of climate-driven famine, sea-borne-invasion, region-wide warfare, and politico-economic collapse, in whose wake new societies and new ideologies were created.
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2. Origin of copper ores of Nordic Bronze Age [North Tyrol, Ibernian Peninsula, Sardinia]
Journal of Archaeological Science doi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.07.018
Moving metals II: provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts by lead isotope and elemental analyses
Johan Ling et al.
The first part of this research published previously proved without doubt that the metals dated to the Nordic Bronze Age found in Sweden were not smelted from the local copper ores. In this second part we present a detailed interpretation of these analytical data with the aim to identify the ore sources from which these metals originated. The interpretation of lead isotope and chemical data of 71 Swedish Bronze Age metals is based on the direct comparisons between the lead isotope data and geochemistry of ore deposits that are known to have produced copper in the Bronze Age. The presented interpretations of chemical and lead isotope analyses of Swedish metals dated to the Nordic Bronze Age are surprising and bring some information not known from previous work. Apart from a steady supply of copper from the Alpine ores in the North Tyrol, the main sources of copper seem to be ores from the Iberian Peninsula and Sardinia. Thus from the results presented here a new complex picture emerges of possible connectivities and flows in the Bronze Age between Scandinavia and Europe .
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3. Climate, Not Spaniards, Brought Diseases That Killed Aztecs
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/08/01/climate-not-spaniards-brought-diseases-that-killed-aztecs/#.UgeHjayKJMw
By Linda Marsa
Extracts:
The following excerpt from Marsa's forthcoming book, 'Fevered: How a Hotter Planet Will Harm Our Health and How We Can Save Ourselves,' was originally published on PLOS Blogs as part of their series 'The Science of Extinction and Survival: Conversations on Climate Change.'
The wild swings in weather that are expected to become commonplace as the planet gets warmer, more frequent and severe droughts, followed by drenching rains' change ecosystems in a way that awaken and expedite the transmission of once dormant diseases.
Intriguingly, this type of weather pattern may be what led to the fall of the once mighty Aztec Empire in the early 16th century, and not as is commonly held, by the invasion of European colonialists, who brought with them diseases like mumps, measles and smallpox for which the native populations lacked immunity.
Curious timing
When Hernando Cortes and his army conquered Mexico starting in 1519, there were roughly about 25 million people living in what is now Mexico. A hundred years later, after a series of epidemics decimated the local population, perhaps as few as 1.2 million natives survived. Records confirm there was a smallpox epidemic in 1519 and 1520, immediately after the Europeans arrived, killing between 5 and 8 million people. But it was two cataclysmic epidemics that occurred in 1545 and 1576, 25 and 55 years after the Spanish conquest, which swept through the Mexican highlands and claimed as many as 17 million lives.
To Dr. Rodolfo Acuna-Soto, a Harvard-trained infectious disease specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, it made no sense that a deadly outbreak of European origin could occur so long after the Spanish arrived, because the natives who survived previous plagues would have passed on their immunities.
To find answers, Acuna-Soto spent a dozen year poring through ancient documents written by 16th century Spanish priests who worked with the Aztecs to preserve a record of their history, language and culture. These texts also tracked key natural events, storms, droughts, frosts and illness. In particular, they detailed the plagues of cocoliztli (Nahuati for 'pest'), a disease that seemed far more virulent than smallpox.
Querying the climate
In his research, Acuna-Soto had noticed a pattern: the plague was preceded by years of severe drought but the epidemics occurred only during wet weather, and heavy rainfall. To confirm his observations, Acuna-Soto worked with a Mexican-American team of dendrochronologists, scientists who study tree rings to date changes in climate, and compared the 16th century historical accounts with tree-ring records from a forest of 450-year-old Douglas fir trees in a remote region of central Mexico near Durango.
The tree rings indicated that the most severe and sustained drought in North America in the past 500 years occurred in the mid-16th century. But there were heavy downpours in the years around 1545 and 1576, which coincided with the cocolitzli outbreaks. 'The smoking gun was the tree ring data,' Acuna-Soto said.
Acuna-Soto is now convinced that the death knell for the Aztecs was an indigenous hemorrhagic fever virus spread by rodents, not the Spanish conquest.
The rat population was depleted during the drought, when food was scarce. But once the rains returned, food and water were suddenly plentiful and the number of infected rats exploded, spreading the deadly scourge to humans.
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Brit-Am Comment:
The above article is interesting and worth consdiering. Nevertheless, DNA findings indicate that most Mexicans are descended from Spanish males and Native Indian females.
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4. Germans Responsible for Imagery Associating Jews with Swine
Judensau 2010
Daniel N. Leeson*
http://jsantisemitism.org/pdf/jsa_2-2.pdf
p. 393 ff.
The centerpieces of this essay are the infamous and public Judensau
depictions of medieval Europe, statuary that frequently contained both scatological
and COPROPHAGOUS [feeding on excrement] elements. The known examples seem to have
been in the German realm, even those now found in France, Switzerland,
Poland, and Sweden; Poland and Sweden were under heavy German influence,
if not actually populated by Germans.
A Jew, frequently reading,
might ride on the back of a pig, occasionally in a reversed position. Or else
a Jew might embrace a pig, sometimes in a position that implied some form
of copulatory behavior. One or more Jews, sometimes children, may be
seen underneath the pig, suckling at its teats. There may be a Jew positioned
behind the pig, being sprayed with or eating excrement, or drinking the
pig's urine, or pointing at the pig's rectum. A Jew might be seen kissing the
snout of the pig or the pig kissing a Jew.
Rev. Martin Luther gave a personal interpretation of a specific Judensau,
one still on public display in Wittenburg, Germany,...
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5. Pope Pius -12 was an accessory to the Kidnapping of Numerous Jewish Children
Jewish Organization Implores Pope To Help Identify Hidden Children of Holocaust
http://lubavitch.com/news/article/2026158/Jewish-Organization-Implores-Pope-To-Help-Identify-Hidden-Children-of-Holocaust.html
Recently, a survivor from Holland gave Yad L'Achim a list of over 2,000 names of children who were handed over to Catholic families and institutions to hide them from the Nazis.Â
Besides Jewish parents who perished in the war and never claimed their children, many Christian families, on instructions from the Vatican, refused to return children. According to recent reports, a letter from the archives of the Catholic Church in France from Pope Pius XII to his representative in Paris on November 20, 1946 shows that he ordered Jewish children who were baptized during the Holocaust not to be returned to their parents.
'If the children were given over to the church by their parents and the parents are now requesting they be returned, they can be returned as long as the children were never baptized,' explains the letter issued with the full power of the Pope's office and believed to have been accepted throughout Europe as common practice.
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6. Dutch Government (1949) Forced at Least 358 Jewish Infants to Become Gentiles!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Eindhoven
But even these attempts by individual Jews did not prevent that in 1949, some 358 of the 1,400 Jewish orphans had been placed within a non-Jewish environment. Even up to this day, the way how the Dutch government dealt with this issue has caused pain and bitterness within the Jewish community.
Jews in Holland Protest Against Regulations Preventing Recovery of Jewish Children
http://www.jta.org/1949/07/03/archive/jews-in-holland-protest-against-regulations-preventing-recovery-of-jewish-children#ixzz2anANzvT9
July 3, 1949
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7. Was there a Jewish temple in ancient Egypt?
By STEPHEN GABRIEL ROSENBERG
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Was-there-a-Jewish-temple-in-ancient-Egypt-318363
Extracts:
Just a hundred years ago, they were searching for it desperately. German, French and Italian archaeological expeditions were mounted to comb the lower stretches of Elephantine Island in the Nile River, in southern Egypt, but without success. They had been activated by the publication in 1911, two years earlier, of papyrus documents from the area that contained personal stories of members of a Jewish military colony in the area from the 5th century BCE. According to the document, there had been a temple in their midst of the colony. But where, exactly? ...
The papyrus scrolls were specific. The Jewish colonists lived in peace with their Egyptian neighbors, and they kept the Jewish laws. In fact, the Persian Emperor Darius II had commanded them to keep the Passover feast of unleavened bread in 418 BCE and not to drink beer for seven days after Nissan 14, according to one of the papyri. The area at the time was under Persian control; it had been captured by Cambyses in 525 BCE, and the Jewish colony was under Persian jurisdiction.
They occupied a whole row of mud-brick houses, some of them married Egyptian wives, some did not, and altogether they lived their lives in peace and quiet. Why were they there? They were a military unit serving there to guard Egypt's southern border. They were on Elephantine Island, opposite Aswan on the mainland, and it was here, at the first cataract of the Nile, that Egypt had always had to defend itself against infiltrators from the south, where the poorer nations were desperate to enter and enjoy the riches of their wealthy neighbors.
But why were the Hebrews doing this job? The Persians were also keen to guard the border and they trusted the Jews, who had come to Egypt as refugees and were not allowed to work or to own land as citizens, but could serve as mercenaries, and that is what they did.
There was a whole colony of them, they built their houses and it seems set them around a small temple, at least according to the papyri.
There was no record of this Jewish colony in the history books, nothing in the works of Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, and nothing in the Talmud or any official Jewish records, nothing at all except in the papyri that had been found in 1893. ... other papyri on the subject had come into the hands of British and German scholars in 1901 and 1903..
Among other details, the documents described a shrine standing in an open courtyard with an altar on which animal sacrifices were offered. It had stood before the conquest of Egypt (in 525 BCE.) by the Persians and Cambyses had spared it, although destroying other temples.
It remained standing until about 400 BCE, when the Persians were driven out by the Egyptians. (It had been destroyed at one time by the priests of Khnum, who had an adjoining temple, but it was rebuilt again a few years later, on the orders of the Persian governor. The priests of Khnum were powerful because Khnum was the ramheaded god who was presumed to govern the rise and fall of the Nile from this spot, at the first cataract).
THIS WAS the story and the European expeditions were desperate to find the temple, but after WWI they lost interest and it was not till 1967 that another expedition was mounted. This was not to search for the temple, but to record all the pagan temples that had been built at this important site in southern Egypt.
They recorded many Egyptian temples of various periods but, after many years, also found what they called 'the Aramaic village.' This was a series of mud-brick houses, in ruins, that were lined up along two sides of a central site with a fine plaster surface, and a small building paved in fine tiles.
Luckily, Hebrew University professor Bezalel Porten had published his plan of the Jewish colony houses, based on the papyrus documents, and the German team recognized that what they had found were the Jewish houses around the temple site, all as Porten had predicted from the documents.
The temple itself was small, in fact only half of it remained, but it had a fine tile floor in two layers, indicating that the first had been destroyed and then replaced. It stood in a courtyard of fine plasterwork, while the houses only had crude mud floors. So this was the temple, and the papyri were true.
The final discovery was only made in 1997, but it indicated a small Jewish temple in southern Egypt, built to serve a Jewish colony that acted as garrison to defend the southern approach to the rich country of Egypt.
The Jews had acted as mercenaries to the Persian colonizers, so when the latter were ousted by the Egyptians in about 400 BCE....
There is however the other possibility: that they escaped.
If they escaped... they most probably would have gone south and may even have got as far as Ethiopia...