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Useful Definitions
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Hebrews: (people), group of tribes of Semitic stock that, according to tradition, migrated from Mesopotamia to Palestine during the 2nd millennium BC. Some scholars, however, trace their origin to the Wilderness (that is, the Sinai) rather than to Mesopotamia. The Hebrews moved to Egypt, where they were enslaved. When released from bondage in Egypt under the lawgiver Moses, they journeyed through the Wilderness and thereafter, under Joshua, conquered and settled Palestine. The term Hebrew is applied in the Bible to Abraham (see Genesis 14:13). Etymologically, the name Hebrews seems to mean "those who pass from place to place" or "nomads," a designation applied to them by the Amorites. It is generally assumed, although denied by some scholars, that the Hebrews are the people called Habiru or Habiri in the tablets found at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt; written about 1400 BC, these were found in 1887. This assumption coincides with biblical tradition; the Amarna correspondence, however, makes no reference to the origin or ethnic character of the Habiru. In Genesis 40:15, Joseph explains to the Egyptians that he had been kidnapped from "the land of the Hebrews"; in Exodus 2:6, the daughter of Pharaoh recognizes Moses as "one of the Hebrews' children." The implicatIon of these sources is that in early times the Israelites were known to foreigners as Hebrews. In later times the Israelites applied the name to themselves, as in Jonah 1:9. Canaanites, in the Old Testament, original inhabitants of the land of Canaan. According to the Book of Judges, the Israelites, during the 2nd millennium BC or earlier, gradually subjugated the Canaanite cities. By the end of the reign of Solomon, king of Israel, the Canaanites had virtually been assimilated into the Hebrew people, among whom they appear to have exerted a reactionary religious influence. The Canaanite religion itself was based on the worship of the divinities Baal and Ashtoreth. Biblical scholars now believe that the Hebrew language was derived from Canaanite sources, and that the Phoenician language was an early form of Hebrew. Recent discoveries indicate that, before the Hebrew conquest of the south of Canaan, the Canaanites and the Phoenicians constituted a single nation, and that the people now known as the Phoenicians subsequently developed as a separate nation. Jews: In Jewish history, the term is applied specifically to those tribes that accepted Yahweh as their deity, from the time of their prehistoric origins to the time they conquered ancient Palestine. Modern Jews are members of a separate ethnic community or fellowship rather than of a race. In 1970 the Israeli Knesset adopted legislation defining a Jew as one born of a Jewish mother or a convert. Zionism: The rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, and especially the intensification of anti-Semitism during the 1880s, encouraged European Jews to seek haven in their "promised land," Palestine. Theodor Herzl, author of The Jewish State (1896; translated 1896), founded the World Zionist Organization in 1897 to solve Europe's "Jewish problem". As a result, Jewish immigration to Palestine greatly increased. Zionism today is based on the unequivocal support of two basic principles—the autonomy and safety of the state of Israel and the right of any Jew to settle there (the Law of Return)—which together provide the guarantee of a Jewish nationality to any Jew in need of it.
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