Educate. Empower. Choose.
If you came here because you want to know how far back the Jewish story goes, how Christianity is born inside that story, and why non-denominational Christians in this country read the Jewish people as brothers and sisters — without a sermon standing in for the record — you are in the right place. The National American Citizen Association educates from documents you can open yourself. Free people cannot choose what they have not been taught. This page is history. It is not a ranking of souls.
Why Israel Matters is who Israel is in 1948 and after. What We Inherited is the American test and the 1979 warning. This one is the older spine those essays sit on.
How far back
Israel’s founding text does not begin with 1948. It begins with a people and a land:
ERETZ-ISRAEL (the Land of Israel) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
Source: Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948
The same document says that after exile the people “remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return.” That is the Jewish people’s own account of who they are. It is not a slogan written last week.
The Book of Books is the Tanakh: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Open it.
Abraham. Genesis 12 is the call and the land:
Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
Source: Genesis 12:1–3, King James Version (public domain)
That is the people’s scripture, not an excavation report. Archaeology does not independently date Abraham as a private biography. What the extra-biblical record does show is that a people named Israel was already in Canaan by the late thirteenth century BCE.
Israel as a people, on stone. The victory inscription of Pharaoh Merneptah, carved in his fifth year and kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, is dated by Egyptologists to about 1208 BCE. It names Israel as a people — not a city — in Canaan. That is the earliest extra-biblical mention of the name. In the ninth century BCE an Aramaic victory inscription from Tel Dan, now in the Israel Museum, names a “king of Israel” and the “House of David.” Those are stones, not sermons.
Sinai. Exodus 19–20 is the Torah’s own account of the law given at the mountain: a people, a covenant, commandments. This page will not pretend that archaeologists have photographed the event. It will say what the book says, because that book is the legal and moral spine the Jewish people carried through exile. The 1948 Declaration calls it the Book of Books for a reason.
Jerusalem. In that same scripture Jerusalem is the city of David and the site of the Temple. The 1948 Declaration locates Jewish peoplehood in that land. After “being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it.” Hebrew copies of those scriptures survive from the late Second Temple period. The Library of Congress exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, with fragments courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority, includes a Psalms scroll from Qumran copied about 30–50 CE — the same psalms. The people kept the book.
Christianity is born inside that story
Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew. That is not a modern talking point. It is what the Christian papers themselves say.
The Gospel according to Matthew opens:
The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Source: Matthew 1:1, King James Version
Luke records his circumcision and presentation under Jewish law. John records him saying, “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22). The apostles were Jews. The first church in the New Testament is in Jerusalem. Paul, who wrote to the congregations of the Roman world, says of himself:
Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.
Source: Romans 11:1, King James Version
The Christian Old Testament is the Hebrew Bible those men already had. Luke 24:44 names “the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms.” Churches later disagree about a few extra books. They do not disagree that the Tanakh is the older half of the Christian Bible.
Outside the church’s own books, a Roman historian writing in the early second century places the founder of the Christians in that same Jewish country, under a named Roman official. Tacitus, Annals 15.44:
Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.
Source: Tacitus, Annals 15.44 (Church and Brodribb translation, Wikisource)
Tiberius ruled 14–37 CE. Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judea in that reign. That is the documentary date for the crucifixion: a Jew executed by Rome in Judea in the first third of the first century. The movement that followed kept the Hebrew scriptures and added its own.
Christianity does not replace the Jewish people as a people. It starts there.
Brothers and sisters — and the American habit of opening the same papers
This page does not claim that every Christian agrees. Denominations argue. Some churches have taught contempt. Some Christians have been steadfast friends. The National American Citizen Association is speaking here to the American civic habit, especially among non-denominational Christians, of reading the same papers: the Tanakh as Old Testament, the New Testament as a Jewish-born witness, and the American Declaration as a claim about the Creator.
Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study finds that the share of Americans who identify with nondenominational Protestantism is growing, even as some older denominational families have declined as shares of the population. That is a survey fact, not a church decree. Those readers can open Romans 11 without waiting for a bishop:
And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert grafted in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.
Source: Romans 11:17–18, King James Version
The grafted branch does not own the root. That is the text. Open it.
Genesis 12 is the other text this page puts in the reader’s hands, not as a foreign-policy statute and not as a pulpit order: a blessing on a people and, through that people, on the families of the earth. Shared scripture. Shared Creator. Brothers and sisters is a way of reading those papers. It is not a claim that every pew in America reads them the same way.
The American Founders wrote the Creator into the civil claim. The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Source: National Archives
Rights come from the Creator, not from Congress. What We Inherited is the full American test. This page only needs the sentence: the same Creator-language that non-denominational Christians and Jews can both recognize is the language the Republic used when it was born.
The American civic test
The First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Source: National Archives, Bill of Rights
Article VI binds officers by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution, “but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
Source: U.S. Constitution, Article VI, National Archives
This page is the Jewish story and Christianity born inside it. The civic test is those papers, and this Constitution. The reader opens them.
The 1979 warning is not this page. It is What We Inherited. The Iranian people are not the enemy.
What to do with this
Educate. Open the scriptures and the Constitution. Read Genesis 12 and Romans 11 as texts, not as a feed. Read the 1948 Declaration’s first paragraph. Read the First Amendment and Article VI.
Empower. A citizen who can quote those papers cannot be talked out of the Jewish story, or out of the Christian origin inside it.
Choose. Choose to tell a people from a regime. Choose to tell a person from an ideology. Choose to teach the next generation the documents, not a rewrite.
You are in the right place. The National American Citizen Association will keep putting the papers in your hands.
Sources
- Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948. Yale Avalon. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp
- Genesis 12:1–3; Exodus 19–20; Matthew 1:1; John 4:22; Luke 24:44; Romans 11:1, 17–18. King James Version (public domain).
- Tacitus, Annals 15.44. Church and Brodribb translation. Wikisource.
- Merneptah victory inscription (Egyptian Museum, Cairo), conventional Egyptological date c. 1208 BCE; Israel as a people in Canaan. Standard treatment: Michael G. Hasel, “Israel in the Merneptah Stela,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 296 (1994).
- Tel Dan inscription (Israel Museum), ninth century BCE; “king of Israel” and “House of David.” Israel Antiquities Authority / Israel Museum.
- Library of Congress, Scrolls from the Dead Sea exhibition; Psalms Scroll (11QPs), Israel Antiquities Authority, copied ca. 30–50 CE. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/scrolls/
- Declaration of Independence. U.S. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
- Constitution of the United States, Article VI; First Amendment. U.S. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript ; https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript
- Pew Research Center, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, executive summary (Feb. 26, 2025). https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-executive-summary/ (nondenominational Protestant share; not a survey of other religions)
- National American Citizen Association, What We Inherited. https://nacagroup.org/what-we-inherited/
- National American Citizen Association, Why Israel Matters. https://nacagroup.org/israel-safeguarding-rights/
Civic education and political commentary. Quotations are from the public documents linked above.
