First People

Since semantics is important It occured to me that we Jews should be referred to as "the First People." This is how Canada solved the problem of how to refer to the indigenous tribes who inhabited the land that they stole, by calling them the "first peoples." In the US they were first erroneously called Indians, based on Columbus's claim that he had reached the "Indies" by sailing west. Then they were referred to as "American Indians" in an attempt to correct this misnomer, and finally, they came to be called "native Americans" as opposed to the millions of immigrants from all over the world who poured into the "empty land."

There is little dispute that the Jews have the oldest civilization in the world, that has remained in continuous existence for nearly 6,000 years (we are currently in year 5770 of the Jewish calendar). Many other very ancient civilizations have died out in the intervening period, such as the ancient Egyptians (replaced first by Christianity and then by Islam), the Babylonians, the Romans. Indian Hindu civilization considers itself to be ca. 4,000 years old, and Japanese civilization is a mere ca. 2,000 years old (actually the Japanese are now known to have originated from Taiwan), and so on.

As the progenitor of the monotheistic tradition that encompasses Christianity and Islam, the Jews can be considered to be the founding civilization of ca. 2.4 billion people world-wide. Of course, many Christians and Muslims hate to admit their religion's basis in Judaism, particulalry it's ethics, but it is a fact. Jesus himself and most of the early Christians were practising Jews, it was mainly Peter who later spread the belief to non-Jews through Rome, and it was the Emperor Constantine who codified that religion into what we now know as Christianity (originally the Byzantine or Greek Orthodox tradition). Hence we have what has been called "Judeo-Christian civilization." Mohammed the Arabic prophet, as described in the Koran, met many Jews who inhabited the peninsula that later came to be called Arabia, and derived much of his religious ideology, and also much of his prehistory, from them. Thus, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are sacred to Muslims, although they tend to overlook that.

In order to get away from the onerous connotations of the complex word "Jew" that originally meant an inhabitant of Judea, including its more recent racist associations, I suggest that a more respectable title, that suggests the ancient lineage and founding character of this people, that they be referred to in future as "The First People"!