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Searching for Exile: Truth or Myth

For centuries, Jews have lamented the destruction of their holy city Jerusalem and their temple by the Romans, which they believed was the beginning of their long 2000 years of exile. Exile is not only a religious Jewish belief but for millions of Jewish and non Jewish alike it is a historical fact. But what has been considered as fact for centuries is now being challenged by archeological evidence unearth across Israel. Here in the ancient town of Sepphoris just 70 miles from Jerusalem evidence points not to a people driven into exile but on the contrary to a population that not only survived but flourished. So why has exile been seen as a reality for thousands of years? and if it did not take place exactly as told, then what accounts for the millions of Jews who over the centuries have settled around the world? and perhaps the inevitable question, what happened to the inhabitance of places like Sepphoris who were never exiled.

Until 1948 a predominately Muslim Palestinian village stood on the ruins of Sepphoris, the village was destroyed and its inhabitance barred from returning. Is it possible that some of the Palestinian residence are descendants of ancient Jews who were never exiled?

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  1. FACT: Over 100,000,000 Christian innocents were exterminated by All Anti-Christian Jewish Red Commissars in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution under the orders of Trotsky, the Jewish Commissar of Commissars.
    Yet Spielberg will never Direct a “Schindler’s List” Movie for them or their genocide. Why is that? Because Jews did it. Christians were murdered in the USSR under Jewish Marxism between 1917-1945, and many of the Marxists came to Russia from New York to do this to Christians in 1917 after Jacob Schiff, the Jewish anti-Christian maniac banker who owned The Guaranty National Trust, the largest bank in the United States, financed Lenin and Trotsky $35 million for the Red Revolution and the mass killing of these Christian souls. We must never forget this.

  2. It is well known that there were Jews living in the Galilee during and after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. It is also well known that during the war of independence, the inhabitants of Safuria were forced to leave their homes. What you did not say in your film was that this town was a hotbead of resistance to the Jewish state. There were other towns in the area where people were not expelled- Kfar Cana, Mash-had, Reina, and Nazareth. While I agree that expelling people from their homes is not fair, it was a war that brought about this tragic event. In war, as we see now in Syria, people leave, whether of their own volition or by force. Here in Israel,and the Palisitinian territories it has become a culture to yearn for the past, and to use that past as an excuse to cause wars and unrest. I wonder why it is that only the Palisitinians feel they can mourn their losses, and not move on with life? Why are there still refugee camps after 70 years?
    My family was lucky to leave Europe before world war 2, but many were caught and slaughtered.
    Those who survived, moved on, built new families and lives, and mourned in private.
    It’s time to stop trying to prove that Israel is the bad bully in the neighborhood, and build a successful, stable Palestine with good schools and health care, industries, businesses and infrustructure. It’s time to stop killing, inciting and blaming.

  3. I am a religious jew and I can state that their assumption that jews believe ALL jews were exiled is simply wrong. In fact, it is impossible because one of our talmuds, the ‘jerusalem talmud’ was written in israel after the roman exile. The ‘babylonian talmud’ makes it very clear that there were still jews in israel and there was correspondence with them. The talmuds are some of the most important jewish books, still widely studied today, not some kind of secret document. This documentary is working from an completely incorrect premise. Perhaps the authors should have checked their facts.

  4. Non-biased documentary about Judaism? I am literally lost for words.
    Most people with common sense understand how most of Jewish history is
    propaganda and lies. It’s refreshing to watch a decent documentary
    about the true history of Judea.

    • In 1998, Jewish history was rewritten by the Palestine Authority for the purpose of denying Israel’s right to exist and enable Arabs to lay a false claim to the land of Israel.
      http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=487

      • Jewish history was rewritten in 1945. Lies, lies and more lies. Israel have committed the Palestinian holocaust since 1947 by illegally occupying Palestinian land. Israel does not have the right to exist as a state because Judaism is a religion and not a race and has never ever been a state. You need to seriously educate yourself to the lies and corruption of Israel. Israel even attacked Syria with chemical weapons and blamed it on Assad. I hate muslims as much as the next man but jews are far far worse.

        • Wrong. Israel’s borders were created in 1917. There is no such thing as “Palestinian land”, never has been and there still isn’t today. Research the Merneptah Stele and the Mesha Stele which prove that Israel has existed for at least the last 3500+ years.
          Today’s so-called “Palestinians” are an Arab people with Arab culture, Arabic language and Arab history. “Palestinians” are the world’s newest of all peoples who only began to exist in a single day on 4th June, 1967 (as verified by Walid Shoebat, a Jordanian, who suddenly became a “Palestinian” literally overnight). They are illegal squatters/invaders. Most hail from Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
          Sunni Muslims under the leadership of Amin al-Husseini began a campaign to fill the British Mandate with an uncontrolled mass of illegal muslims from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The largest crowds arrived in the mid 1920’s to late 1930’s, through rapid, illegal and uncontrolled mass migration (hijrah). This illegal flood of people was noted and recorded by the British government as the REAL cause of the foreign “Palestinian” presence in the region. They were never born there, and none of them originated from the British Mandate.
          Therefore, “Palestine” is Arab moslem taqiyya since the terrorist Palestine Authority ordered, in 1998, that Israel’s history to be rewritten and replaced with with fabricated data in order to try to justify their illegal invasion and occupation of Israel and deny that country’s right to exist. “Palestinians” have no genuine claim – historical or otherwise – to be occupying any Israeli land space.

  5. None biased documentary about Judasim? I am literally lost for words. Most people with common sense understand how most of Jewish history is propaganda and lies. It’s refreshing to watch a decent documentary about the true history of Judea.

  6. Too bad then that the local Arabs have bought into the myth of pan-Arabism back in the day and did not welcome the Jews. They have instead chosen their Arab (and later on Palestinian) identity.

  7. Up until this moment, I had no idea that there had never been a mass expulsion of the Jews. I was aware that Jewish settlements remained, but I thought that it was a statistically insignificant number.

    The thought that some of the present day Palestinians could be descendants of the Jewish inhabitants from almost two thousand years back, and that somewhere along the line, those ancestors converted to Islam is a stunning thought, rife with irony.

    I think I’m going to have to think about this for a long time to wrap my head around it.

  8. After the destruction of the temple in 70AD, the Romans exiled the majority of the Jewish population. However there were individual Jewish communities which were permitted to remain living in Israel. Additionally, many Jews managed to return to Israel despite the majority having settled in various countries. The exile was primarily in terms of the loss of the temple and the loss of a Jewish government in Israel.

    There has been uninterrupted Jewish residency in Israel for virtually the entire 1943 years since the destruction of the temple. In addition, there have been many non-Jewish communities throughout.

    As a whole, this documentary is not worth very much. There obviously has been very minimal research done by its writer(s), if any at all.

    • The documentary shows that the Jewish population was NOT exiled contrary to popular belief. The original Jewish community of the temple stayed and later converted. It seems the original Hebrews/Jews/Israelites are now the Palestinian Arabs!

  9. This is a doc by an Israeli born director who basically says the exile is a Myth! Here he is in a BBC debate in which a Rabbi says they always knew the Exile was a Myth: http://vimeo.com/78858757#

    There is also an Israeli Professor of History (Shlomo Sand) who says the same thing: His very intresting lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EmvANgw9Mk

  10. Appears to be the BBC cut/edit of the original documentary