Theory of Clans

The words by Herzl, who saw in Jews, scattered all over the world, carrying different cultures and speaking different languages, one people able to unite for the creation of its State, sound today as important as when they were said. Today again we should search the answer to what the fact that we Jews are one people means? And again our survival as a community depends on the answer to that question.

The Jewish people could be compared to an extraordinary mosaic, each component of which is life of a Jew. These components may differ between themselves as much as human lives may differ and, yet, it is them, which being invisibly interconnected, create a single entity called a "people". Similarly to the way we cannot conceive the general plan of the artist when looking at a mosaic from a close distance and seeing but its separate parts, so looking at one or another group of Jews, it is hard to imagine the role of the group and its essential necessity for the life of the people. But let us ask ourselves a question – is there any structure in the "mosaic of the Jewish people" and can we get closer to its recognition?

To answer the question on existence of any structure in the life of the Jewish people, it is necessary to take distance from the life of one or several Jews and to try to look at the picture of the people's life "from the bird's eye view". Just such an attempt was undertaken by Israeli Institute for Jewish people heritage, culture and genealogy "Am haZikaron" ("People of Memory"). The Institute studied the life of 63 Jewish clans during long periods of time, up to 950 years. The sampling included very different clans, both famous and less prominent ones. Lives of hundreds of members of each clan was considered and studied. The collected factual material demonstrated convincingly the existence of certain dominant features characterizing members of different Jewish clans and expressing themselves continuously throughout ages. It turned out that the dominant features of the clan were stably preserved in the clan despite isolated living of clan members during not less than 100-150 years not only in different countries, but on different continents, in total absence of communication between branches of the clan, and also despite the kinship remoteness of 10, 25 and more generations, at complete absence of any information of other members of the family. Thus the research unequivocally arrived at the astounding conclusion that dominant features of Jewish clans remain constant during the period of at least 950 researched years. One can read in more detail about the study and its consequences for the understanding of the essence and the unity of the Jewish people in the paper. The work was awarded a prize and medal "Zeiti Yerushalaim" for the contribution to the national heritage and its development.

The theory of clans allows deeper insight into the comparison of the Jewish people with a single system or a body. This comparison, which first appeared in the Jerusalem Talmud and was much discussed later in the Kabbalistic teachings, says that every Jew occupies a unique place in the People and his/her mission are so important that its incompletion jeopardizes the life of the whole system. If to continue the comparison with a body, then different representatives, or groups of representatives, of the Jewish people are compared with parts of one body. Then, different missions may differ from each other as strongly as different parts of one body do. The theory of clans expands the paradigm allowing to compare the life of the Jewish people in time with the way cells inside a body divide and die, but preserving their specialization. So in the Jewish People, people when dying pass their higher "specialization" (here this notion must be understood extremely non-literally) to their descendants. Along with that, it is quite possible that specialization occurs in other peoples as well, whose life, as it was observed long ago, resembles life of a human, from birth to death. Whereas the unique longevity of the Jewish People, of this eternal partner of the Lord that despite everything did not break the Covenant and kept loyalty to the only true G-d, implies special properties in the structure of the life of the Jewish People. The theory of clans for the first time opens the possibility to create the "map" of this life and to discover its properties.