Challenger, your erasure of the Jewish people is deeply disturbing.
For those lurkers who may not have fallen into this level of irrationality: There is plenty of historical, practical and archaeological evidence for the existence of the Jewish people, going back thousands of years, by any criteria you care to apply.
I'm not "erasing" anything; it's not possible to erase what never existed in the first place. "Judaism" has existed as a religion for thousands of years, that's undeniable and has attracted many converts throughout Europe and the Middle East as far away as China. What IS irrational is ascribing a universal "ethnicity" to a world wide religious cult as Zionists have done. I've no objection against people identifying themselves as Jewish wherever they come from, but that doen't in any way make them ethnically Judean/Samaritan/Galileean/Jubusite/Idumean, etc. and does not give them any beter claim to Palestine than the native population.
As late as the 20th century and even after Balfour wrote his note Lord Montague a prominent Jewish peer and the only Jewish member of the government wrote a rebuttal to Balfour which included the following:
"...
I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation..."
This reflected the majority view amongst Jewish people in 1917.