(01-05-2021, 02:44 AM)TheO-LineMatters Wrote: I was just going by what I see in Gal Gadot, Natalie Portman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Gene Simmons, Bar Rafaeli and other famous people from Israel. All of them look pretty pale skinned to me. Nowhere near as dark skinned as what I see from other Middle Eastern countries. I always found that kind of strange.

As Lucky already pointed out, the diaspora split three ways. The Mizrahim in Arabia and Persia, the Sephardim in Spain but expelled to North Africa in 1492, then the Ashkenazi in Germany.  The history of all three groups is fuzzy at best, but they each went through cycles of acceptance and persecution. There was some intermarriage and some conversion into Judaism during the accepting times.  In the times of persecution, there was not just death but also conversion out of Judaism.  It's hard to be sure, but it's thought that most of the Mizrahi converted to Islam along the way, and most of the Sephardi converted to Catholicism.  Fewer of the Ashkenazi converted.  The government of Germany wasn't centralized, so the Ashkenazi had many escape valves as local persecutions came and went. This is why the Ashkenazi are the most numerous of the three today, and why they are whiter-looking than the other two.

It's also important to remember that many people in the middle east and east mediterranean converted to Judaism prior to the events of the New Testament. The Septuagint translation was created by Jewish believers living in Alexandria in the 200s BC, and Paul met Jewish believers everywhere he went

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