Japhetites
Outdated grouping of human beings / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The term Japhetites (sometimes spelled Japhethites; in adjective form Japhetic or Japhethitic) refers to the descendants of Japheth, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.[1] The term was used in ethnological and linguistic writings from the 18th to the 20th centuries as a Biblically derived racial classification for the European peoples, but is now considered obsolete.[2] medieval ethnographers believed that the world had been divided into three large-scale groupings, corresponding to the three classical continents: the Semitic peoples of Asia, the Hamitic peoples of Africa, and the Japhetic peoples of Europe.[3][4]
The term has been used in modern times as a designation in physical anthropology, ethnography, and comparative linguistics. In anthropology, it was used in a racial sense for White people (the Caucasian race).[2] In linguistics, it referred to the Indo-European languages.[2] Both of these uses are considered obsolete nowadays.[2] Only the Semitic peoples form a well-defined language family. The Indo-European group is no longer known as "Japhetite", and the Hamitic group is now recognized as paraphyletic within the Afro-Asiatic family.
Among Muslim historians, Japheth is usually regarded as the ancestor of the Gog and Magog tribes, and, at times, of the Turks, Khazars, and Slavs.[5][6]