The United States government does officially consider Middle Eastern people to be white for census purposes. However this does not mean that is what everyone else considers to be white. Benjamin Franklin famously considered only English and northern German people to be white, even excluding Scandinavians from white status. In the end it's totally arbitrary where you draw the line. What is totally clear is that Jesus was not blond and blue eyed. Those traits were incredibly rare in the middle east both then and today. There is a chance however that Jesus was white passing as many people from the levant are today and probably were back then as well.

Here is a picture of modern day Samaritans who are a sister group to the Jews. They never left their homeland of northern isreal and are therefore probably close to the genetic makeup of ancient Jews.

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Here is a picture of a modern day Lebanese classroom.

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So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian, could also be that he was one of the less white passing ones. But in the end does it really matter? The message of Jesus is the same no matter the case.

[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago

So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian

Who were, incidentally, also not white untill very recently. Even a hundred years ago, a lot of people didn't consider Italians to be white people.

[–] voodooattack@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Except that theory is flawed if you consider the ramifications of the Islamic conquest followed by European crusades, and then you have the Ottoman, French, British, and most recently, Israeli occupation. A lot of rape/interbreeding happened throughout.

I live in Egypt and whole providences here are full of green/blue eyes and blonde/ginger hair as a consequence.

Edit: also forgot the Mongolian hordes. It’s the Middle East, a lot of shit went down tbh

[–] Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago

Even if one claims that there are white passing people there today only because of foreign conquests, then it's important to remember those were also going on before Jesus was born. Most notably Jesus was born in the Palestine province of the Roman Empire. There is even a myth that his dad was a Roman soldier (there is no real evidence of this however). Before the Romans the Greeks ruled isreal after Alexander the greats conquest. So the flow of "white genes" to isreal did not start only after Jesus was born. So I don't think it's a good argument to say everyone was uniformly brown there back then but are all mixed today. That's not true. You could argue however the procentage of white passing people have gone up since then.

[–] shaserlark@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So they are basically Palestinian?

[–] Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A lot of the Palestinians who live in northern isreal descend at least partly if not chiefly from Samaritans who converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic instead of Samaritan Hebrew. The modern Samaritans wouldn't call themselves Palestinians however. They have their own identity and many of them don't speak Arabic.

[–] shaserlark@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Sorry what? Palestinian Arabic is what people no matter if Jewish, Christian, Druze, Muslim, … have been speaking in Palestine. People haven’t been speaking Hebrew there since some thousands of years save for religious purposes. This is equivalent to Italians not speaking Latin, Orthodox people not speaking Old Church Slavonic in every day life. This got only changed in the course of the colonization of Palestine. I recommend Israeli historian Ilan Pappe who wrote a very informative book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine where the language topic and demographics before Zionist colonialism are also discussed.

[–] Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

That's correct. The Samaritans used to speak Samaritan Hebrew, then Samaritan Aramaic and then Palestinian Arabic which was then the main language for at least 800 years. However as I understand they have now mostly switched to Hebrew as they have integrated into the isreali state. This is however a very modern phenomenon.