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Red Jews were a legendary
Jewish nation that appear in vernacular sources in
Germany during the
medieval era until about 1600. According to these texts, the Red Jews were an
epochal threat to
Christendom, and would invade Europe during the
tribulations leading to the end of the world.
Andrew Gow studied the original
German language texts and concluded that the legend of the Red Jews was a conflation of three separate traditions: the
Biblical prophetic references to
Gog and Magog, the
Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and an episode from the
Alexander Romance, in which
Alexander the Great encloses a race of heathens
behind a great wall in Caucasus. These traditions had some overlap already; Gog and Magog are among the nations trapped behind the wall in the
Alexander Romance, and the only ones named in the version of the story appearing in
Qur'an Sura al-Kahf (The Cave) 18:89
Kevin Alan Brook, among others, speculated that the legend of the Red Jews was actually based on misremembered accounts of the Khazars. Indeed, in Expositio in Matthaeum Evangelistam, Christian of Stavelotrefers to the Khazars as Hunnic descendants of Gog and Magog, as well as having been "enclosed" by Alexander, but having since escaped,
Gog and magog
In Classical and medieval sources Gog and Magog were peoples dwelling in territories beyond the
Gates of Alexander, a legendary barrier erected by
Alexander the Great:
Josephus, writing in the 1st century A.D., regarded them as
Scythians, and throughout the
Middle Ages they were variously identified as
Eurasian nomads including the
Huns,
Khazars, and
Mongols, conflated with various other legends concerning the
Amazons,
Red Jews, and the
Ten Lost Tribes of
Israel.
Their names as appear in the
Quran as
Yajuj and
Majuj (
Arabic: يأجوج ومأجوج
Yaʾjūj wa-Maʾjūj), and the Muslim world identified them first with
Turkic tribes from
Central Asia and later with the Mongols. In modern times they remain associated with apocalyptic thinking, especially in the
United States and the
Muslim world
matt damon in a movie about the great wall
@Joey Chizzle
