Japhetic Japhetic Erica Boyer Category="Indo-European"Category="Jewish Christian topics"Category="Race"Japhetic is a term that refers to the supposed descendents of Japheth, one of the three Sons of Noah in the Bible. It corresponds to Semitic (descendents of Shem) and Hamitic (descendents of Ham). Variations of the term include Japhetite and Japhethitic.

Japhetic as a geographical and racial concept

Traditionally, Japheth was understood to have been the progenitor of the peoples of Europe. Thus "Japhetic" came to be used as a synonym for Europeans (or "white people"). In Medieval Europe the world was understood to have been divided into three large-scale racial groupings. In addition to the Japhetic peoples of Europe, the Semitic peoples were equated with all Asians, and Hamitic peoples with Africans.

The link between Japheth and the Europeans stems from Genesis 10:5, which states that the sons of Japheth moved to the "isles of the Gentiles," commonly believed to be the Greek isles.

In the Bible, Japheth is ascribed seven sons: Gomer, Magog, Tiras, Javan, Meshech, Tubal, and Madai.

The intended ethnic identity of these 'descendants of Japheth' is not known for certain. However, over history they have been identified by Biblical scholars with historical nations who were deemed to be descendants of Japheth and his sons-a practice dating back at least to the classical encounters of Jew with Hellene, for example in Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews, I.VI.122 ( Whiston). Josephus wrote:

Japhet, the son of Noah, had seven sons: they inhabited so, that, beginning at the mountains Taurus and Amanus, they proceeded along Asia, as far as the river Tanais (Don), and along Europe to Cadiz; and settling themselves on the lands which they light upon, which none had inhabited before, they called the nations by their own names.

Josephus subsequently detailed the nations supposed to have descended from the seven sons of Japheth.

Among the nations various later writers have attempted to assign to them are as follows:

The term "Caucasian" as a racial label for Europeans derives in part from the assumption that the tribe of Japheth developed its distinctive racial characteristics in the Caucasus area, having migrated there from Mount Ararat before populating Europe. In the same vein, Georgian nationalist histories associated Japheth's sons with certain ancient tribes of the Caucasus area, called Tubals (Tabals, Tibarenoi in Greek) and Meshechs (Meshekhs/Mosokhs, Moschoi in Greek), who they claimed represented ancient pre-Indo-European and non-Semitic, possibly "Proto-Iberian", tribes of Asia Minor of the 3rd-1st millennias BC. This theory influenced the use of the term Japhetic in the linguistic theories of Nikolai Marr (see below). During the eighteenth and nineteenth century the Biblical statement that "God shall enlarge Japheth" (Genesis 9:27) was used by some Christians as a justification for the "enlargement" of European territories through Imperialism, which was interpreted as part of God's plan for the world. The subjugation of Africans was likewise justified by the Curse of Ham.

Linguistics

The term Japhetic was also applied by William Jones, Rasmus C. Rask and other pre-Darwinian linguists to what later became known as the Indo-European language group, on the assumption that the principal languages of Europe would have originated with the tribe of Japheth.

In a conflicting sense, it was also used by the Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr in his Japhetic theory, which was intended to demonstrate that the languages of the Caucasus formed part of a once-widespread pre-Indo-European language group.

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