I am reading a book by Asahel Grant titled "The Nestorians... or, The Lost Tribes" (published 1841) wherein the author presents a very compelling case that the Assyrian Church (which he, I believe, mistakenly conflates with the followers of Nestorius?) is, in fact, composed of some (eight, to be exact) of the so-called Ten Lost Tribes of Israel... and that the very first Disciples/Apostles of Christ began their missionary work abroad (as Jesus had commanded them) by visiting these Israelite Tribes in modern-day northern Iraq and Syria and converting them to Christianity; and thus was born the Assyrian Church.
Does anyone have any thoughts or knowledge about any of this? Such a fascinating notion...
It's basically just nonsense and wishful thinking from Asahel Grant, to find the Ten Lost Tribes. The issue here is genetics, which people like Asahel Grant and others who make similar claims, never bother to look at (for example, that pastor who was saying that modern Germans are descendants of the ancient Assyrians, and that the British are the Ten Lost Tribes, lol).
Assyrian Jews (yes, there is such a thing), who have largely migrated to Israel after Israel's independence, are the closest thing you get to the Ten Lost Tribes, but while some of their ancestry might be from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, they're more likely to have Jewish ancestry from the Babylonian captivity, and even so, they're like roughly half Assyrian in their genetics, some more, some less, but they all have significant Assyrian admixture after having lived in northern Mesopotamia for over two millennia. They're commonly known as "Kurdish Jews", but they have no Kurdish ancestry, and their genetics is most definitely significantly Assyrian with an undeniable Levantine component. This is also why Assyrians on GEDmatch get such high affinity scores with Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews and Georgian Jews, because Assyrian and Armenians are basically the same genetic cluster (we're really the same people but bi-lingual, speaking both Semitic and Indo-European languages in the case of Armenians), with Assyrians having slightly higher Semitic (Levantine) admixture than Armenians, and Armenians having slightly higher Yamnaya (Indo-European) admixture than Assyrians. So, what do you get when Levantine Jews migrate to Georgia and mix with Georgians? You get a population that is very similar genetically to Assyrians, because Assyrians are basically a Caucasian population with some Levantine admixture, not from a Jewish source but Levantine nonetheless. Assyrians and Armenians are basically the Hurro-Urartians who in northern Mesopotamia language shifted to Semitic Akkadian and in Urartu, the language shift was to an Indo-European language.
That said, modern Assyrians regardless of if we're Nestorians or Jacobites or Chaldean Catholics, don't have any Israelite ancestry, because our Levantine component is quite small, and our Levantine component comes mainly from the Akkadians and possibly Amorites, and to a lesser extent, from the Aramaeans, not from the Israelites. This can be seen in our subclades of J1-P58, which is a different branch from the Cohanim 'Y-chromosomal Aaron' subclades of J1-P58. But while we could have some Jewish admixture, it's far back in time, like over 2 millennia at this point. Personally though, I see a strong resemblance between a lot of Assyrians and a lot of Jews. I mean, Ron Jeremy looks like he could be an
ahuno lol.
