The Three Israels: How Matt Baker Turns Complicated History Into Misleading Certainty
Matt Baker wants to teach viewers an important distinction: ancient Israel, the Jewish people, and the modern State of Israel are not the same thing.
He is right about that.
But in Three Meanings of the Word Israel, the creator behind UsefulCharts makes a more troubling mistake. He takes some of the most complicated questions in Jewish history, archaeology, population genetics, and modern politics, then presents simplified answers with a confidence the evidence cannot always support.
The problem is not that Baker invents history. Much of what he says is grounded in legitimate scholarship.
It is that he repeatedly turns partial evidence into definitive conclusions, compresses centuries of demographic change into tidy narratives, and removes consequential historical events from explanations that depend on them.
The result is an educational video that sometimes confuses clarity with accuracy.
And the first problem appears in the oldest surviving reference to Israel itself.
1. The Earliest Recorded Israel Was a People, Not a Kingdom
Baker concludes his video with a convenient chronology.
Ancient Israel existed as a kingdom from approximately 930 to 720 BCE. Israel as a designation for the Jewish people dates from at least 720 BCE. The modern country has existed since 1948.
Three meanings. Three timelines. Three identities.
The difficulty is that the earliest known written reference to Israel predates his ancient kingdom by nearly three centuries.
Around 1208 BCE, the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah commissioned an inscription celebrating military victories. Among the defeated peoples and places, the inscription names Israel.
The crucial detail is how the Egyptian text identifies it.
Unlike the cities mentioned nearby, Israel is marked with hieroglyphs indicating a people rather than a territory or state.
The Posen Library's examination of the Merneptah Stele identifies this as the earliest known extrabiblical reference to Israel. Its classification points to an identifiable population in or near Canaan, not an established Israelite kingdom.
That creates a problem for Baker's central distinction.
His chart begins ancient Israel's history with a political kingdom. Yet the earliest recorded Israel was already a people.
This does not invalidate the distinction between ancient Israelites and later Jewish communities. Those identities developed over time and should not simply be equated.
But it demonstrates why Baker's categories require more explanation than his diagram permits.
The name Israel existed before the state he uses to define its earliest meaning.
His clean chronology excludes that inconvenient fact.
2. Archaeology Confirms Ancient Kings. It Does Not Confirm Their Entire Stories.
Baker correctly identifies important archaeological evidence connecting biblical figures to historical individuals.
The Mesha Stele refers to King Omri of Israel. Assyrian records identify King Hezekiah of Judah and document Sennacherib's military campaign against him.
These are meaningful discoveries.
They establish that certain rulers, kingdoms, and conflicts described in the Bible belong to the historical world.
Baker then makes a considerably larger claim.
He argues that the events described in the Iron Age portions of the Bible can generally be treated as accurate once embellishments and theological interpretations are removed.
That is where reasonable historical reconstruction becomes excessive confidence.
Consider Hezekiah.
Sennacherib's campaign against Judah occurred in 701 BCE. Both biblical and Assyrian sources describe the confrontation.
But agreement that a confrontation occurred is not agreement about everything that happened.
The biblical account describes extraordinary divine intervention against the Assyrian army. Sennacherib's own inscription instead celebrates his destruction of Judahite cities and his domination of Hezekiah.
The Israel Museum's examination of Sennacherib's prism explains that the Assyrian inscription records the campaign but does not explicitly describe a siege of Jerusalem.
Historian Michael Coogan also examines the differences between the biblical and Assyrian accounts, including how the survival of Jerusalem was interpreted as divine intervention.
Both accounts contain historically useful information.
Neither can simply be treated as a neutral record.
The same difficulty extends to the biblical account of the united monarchy under David and Solomon.
In The Oxford History of the Holy Land, historian Lester Grabbe explains that the evidence permits reconstruction of an emerging Israelite monarchy, but many biblical details are not credible.
The magnificent kingdom traditionally associated with Solomon is not securely established in the form described by the biblical narrative.
The historical reality was more limited and remains the subject of substantial scholarly debate.
A 2024 chapter by Shuichi Hasegawa in The Oxford Handbook of the Books of Kings likewise reconstructs Judah's history using archaeological evidence, inscriptions, and selected biblical passages considered reliable—not the Iron Age narrative as a generally accurate whole.
This distinction matters.
Confirming a king's existence does not confirm the biblical account of his reign.
Confirming a battle does not confirm its reported outcome.
And identifying historical material within a religious text does not establish that its remaining narrative can be accepted after removing a few supernatural details.
Baker understands that biblical texts require interpretation. His discussion of mythology makes that clear.
Yet he gives the Iron Age narratives a presumption of reliability that historians must establish passage by passage.
The evidence deserves better treatment than a broad endorsement.
The Abraham Problem
Baker applies the opposite certainty to the Bronze Age.
He says that, from a historical perspective, there was no Abraham who received a divine promise of land and no Jacob whose name became Israel.
There is no independent historical evidence establishing those individuals or the events attributed to them.
That is the defensible conclusion.
But absence of reliable evidence is not proof that every person associated with a traditional narrative never existed.
Historians can reject a story as established history without claiming to have demonstrated the nonexistence of its central character.
An ancient divine promise cannot be verified archaeologically. The existence of an otherwise unattested individual is a different historical question.
Baker's broader skepticism is reasonable.
His categorical wording goes beyond what that skepticism establishes.
3. Jewish History Did Not Begin Its Diaspora in 70 CE
The video's most consequential historical compression concerns the destruction of Jerusalem.
Baker explains that after Rome destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE, most Jews spread throughout Europe.
He subsequently describes Jewish history as developing into three principal groups: Mizrahi Jews in the Middle East, Sephardi Jews in Spain, and Ashkenazi Jews in Germany and later Eastern Europe.
This creates a memorable family tree.
It is also a misleading chronology.
Jewish communities were established outside Judea long before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.
The relevant historical evidence is extensive enough that The Cambridge History of Judaism devotes an entire chapter to the Jewish diaspora before 70 CE.
That chapter documents communities in Greece, the Aegean islands, Asia Minor, Syria, Cyrenaica, Egypt, and Rome.
Alexandria was already home to an especially substantial Jewish population. Jewish settlement in Rome also preceded the destruction of Jerusalem by generations.
The diaspora was therefore not principally created by a single Roman military event.
Nor did Jewish history simply relocate from Judea to Europe.
Jewish communities continued in the region after 70 CE.
Following the revolts against Rome, Galilee became a major center of Jewish population and rabbinic activity.
Oxford's historical overview of Galilee specifically identifies the region's importance after the revolts of 66–70 and 132–135 CE.
Meanwhile, Jewish communities in Mesopotamia retained enormous religious and intellectual importance.
Historian Seth Schwartz, writing in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, emphasizes the geographical variety of ancient Jewish communities and warns that historians do not know precisely how many diaspora Jews descended from emigrants from Palestine.
Baker's account replaces this complicated history with a single apparent sequence:
Jerusalem falls. Jews disperse. Three communities emerge.
But Jewish migration occurred across many centuries, for different reasons, in several directions.
Even the identities Baker assigns to those communities emerged at different historical moments.
Ashkenazi Jewish identity developed in medieval European settings. The YIVO Encyclopedia's history of Ashkenaz traces its expansion from German lands into other parts of Europe.
Sephardi identity is closely associated with Iberian Jewish history and the later dispersal of those communities.
Mizrahi is a much more recent collective designation applied to diverse Jewish populations from Middle Eastern and related backgrounds.
These were not three neatly defined branches formed immediately after 70 CE.
They represent communities and identities shaped by many different historical developments.
By presenting them as the direct outcome of one ancient catastrophe, Baker obscures the very history he is trying to clarify.
4. Jewish Ancestry Cannot Be Reduced to a Convenient Genetic Formula
Baker turns to genetics to answer whether modern Jews descend from ancient Middle Eastern Jewish populations.
He specifically rejects claims that Ashkenazi Jews are merely European converts or descendants of the Khazars without meaningful Middle Eastern ancestry.
The central corrective is supported by substantial genetic research.
But Baker then offers an unusually precise explanation.
He attributes Ashkenazi European ancestry to early intermarriage with Italians and describes the resulting population as approximately half Middle Eastern and half European.
The difficulty is not that these proportions are implausible.
It is that the research is more complicated than his confident account suggests.
A major study published in Cell on November 30, 2022, analyzed DNA from 33 individuals buried in a fourteenth-century Jewish cemetery in Erfurt, Germany.
The researchers found clear genetic connections between medieval and modern Ashkenazi populations.
But they also discovered something Baker's account does not adequately convey.
The medieval population was genetically more diverse than modern Ashkenazi Jews.
The study identified groups with different proportions of ancestry related to Middle Eastern and European populations, including additional Eastern European-related ancestry in one group.
Its authors noted that earlier genetic models estimated European ancestry at approximately 50–70%, depending on the analysis.
They expressly cautioned that the identities of ancestral populations and the precise mixture proportions should not be treated as settled.
This is not a minor technical qualification.
An ancestry estimate depends on the populations used as comparisons, the genetic model, and the historical periods being reconstructed.
Modern Italian, Lebanese, or Eastern European samples can help researchers model historical relationships. They do not automatically identify the precise people involved in an ancient marriage or migration.
The Erfurt findings also indicate that Ashkenazi population history cannot be reconstructed as one uniform mixture occurring at a single known moment.
Baker is right to reject attempts to erase Ashkenazi Jews' Middle Eastern ancestral connections.
But he replaces one simplistic argument with another.
Worse, his discussion risks accepting a premise that should be questioned more fundamentally: that religious or communal authenticity must be established through genetic percentages.
Jewish identity has also been transmitted through religious tradition, community membership, family history, and conversion.
Genetic ancestry can illuminate population history.
It cannot independently decide who is an authentic Jew.
5. The Founding of Israel Was Not Simply a Search for Safety
When Baker reaches the modern State of Israel, he explains Zionism primarily through Jewish persecution.
European Jews endured centuries of discrimination and violence. The Holocaust demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of antisemitism.
Zionists sought a homeland where Jews could live safely.
These are essential elements of the history.
But they do not explain the establishment of a state in territory already inhabited by another population.
Baker tells viewers that different locations were considered for the proposed Jewish homeland.
He discusses possible names, including Judea, Zion, and Carmelia.
Yet the political transformation of Palestine receives remarkably little attention.
The omissions are significant.
On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a declaration supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
The declaration also included an explicit commitment not to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the territory's existing non-Jewish communities.
That qualification was present in the original document because those communities already existed and had interests of their own.
Zionism was also supported by people who were not Jewish.
Christian Zionism developed its own religious and political arguments for Jewish settlement and statehood.
Catherine Loy's study of Christian Zionism traces this distinct movement and its influence, including its religious interpretations of Jewish return to the land.
Baker's description of Zionists as simply a subset of Jews therefore leaves out an important constituency.
More consequentially, the establishment of Israel in 1948 occurred amid war and mass Palestinian displacement.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, approximately 750,000 Palestinian refugees required assistance when the agency began operations in 1950.
These were people who had lost their homes and livelihoods during the 1948 conflict.
Baker explicitly declines to assess whether Israel should have been created or how the present conflict should be resolved.
He is entitled to limit his subject.
But declining to resolve a controversy is different from explaining the origins of a modern state without adequately describing what its establishment meant for the people already living there.
The Jewish desire for security is indispensable to understanding Zionism.
So is Palestinian dispossession.
A historical explanation that includes one while largely excluding the other cannot fully explain the circumstances surrounding the modern state's creation.
6. Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism Are Not Interchangeable—But Neither Are Their Definitions Settled
Baker's central political warning is sound.
Criticizing an Israeli government does not automatically make someone antisemitic.
Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions taken by the Israeli state is antisemitic.
These distinctions are supported by major frameworks addressing contemporary antisemitism.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition explicitly states that criticism of Israel comparable to criticism of other countries is not inherently antisemitic.
It also identifies holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel's actions as an example of antisemitism.
Baker is on firm ground here.
His weaker claim concerns anti-Zionism itself.
He defines it as hostility toward the State of Israel.
But Zionism is a political movement associated with Jewish national self-determination, and opposition to Zionism can take several substantially different forms.
Some opponents reject Jewish national self-determination specifically.
Others oppose ethnonationalism more generally or advocate a different constitutional arrangement in which Jews and Palestinians possess equal political rights.
Some criticism directed at Zionism reproduces recognizable antisemitic stereotypes.
Other criticism addresses nationalism, sovereignty, state institutions, or government policies without targeting Jews as Jews.
These differences are not theoretical.
They are the subject of serious disagreement among scholars and institutions.
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, published in 2021, explicitly distinguishes antisemitism from certain forms of opposition to Zionism and from advocacy for alternative political arrangements guaranteeing equal rights.
The IHRA framework places greater emphasis on forms of opposition to Jewish self-determination that may constitute antisemitism, depending on context.
Neither framework supports simply treating all criticism of Israeli government policy as anti-Zionism.
And neither makes it sensible to classify every political dispute through a binary distinction between hostility toward Jews and hostility toward a country.
Baker wants to prevent people from confusing Jewish identity with Israeli government policy.
That is a necessary objective.
But the same commitment to precision should apply when distinguishing criticism of a government, opposition to a nationalist movement, rejection of a state's constitutional character, and prejudice against a people.
Those positions may overlap.
They are not identical.
A video dedicated to explaining distinctions should not simplify the most politically consequential distinction of all.
7. The Problem Is Not Baker's Conclusion. It Is His Confidence.
The strongest defense of Baker's video is straightforward.
It is an introductory explanation, not an academic monograph.
He correctly distinguishes Jewish peoplehood from Israeli citizenship.
He recognizes that archaeology supports the existence of ancient Israel without establishing every biblical tradition.
He rejects misleading claims that Ashkenazi Jews have no Middle Eastern ancestry.
And he opposes the collective blaming of Jews for the actions of a modern government.
These are substantial strengths.
They also make the video's weaknesses more consequential.
Viewers are more likely to accept an inaccurate detail when it appears alongside several accurate ones.
The problem is therefore not an isolated mistaken date.
It is a recurring method.
Baker begins with complicated historical evidence and produces a tidy answer.
The earliest Israel becomes a kingdom, despite evidence of an earlier people.
The Iron Age Bible becomes broadly reliable, despite disagreements between its accounts and external records.
The Jewish diaspora becomes a consequence of Jerusalem's destruction, despite Jewish communities already flourishing elsewhere.
Medieval Jewish population history becomes a three-way division.
Genetic ancestry becomes a convenient fifty-fifty explanation.
The creation of Israel becomes primarily a story of Jewish safety, with Palestinian displacement largely outside the frame.
These simplifications do not all carry equal weight.
Some are reasonable introductory shortcuts. Others materially change the history a viewer takes away.
The difference is whether a simplification merely omits detail or creates a misleading understanding.
Baker crosses that line most clearly in his treatment of biblical reliability, Jewish dispersal, and population genetics.
His discussion of Israel's establishment also leaves important historical consequences unexplained.
Elle's Verdict
Matt Baker's Three Meanings of the Word Israel succeeds at explaining why ancient Israelites, Jewish people, and Israeli citizens should not be treated as interchangeable categories.
But accuracy requires more than drawing the correct boundaries between words.
It requires respecting uncertainty within those boundaries.
The archaeological record is not as accommodating as Baker implies. Jewish demographic history is not as linear. Genetic ancestry is not as easily reduced to percentages. And the creation of a modern nation-state cannot be understood solely through the aspirations of those who established it.
Baker's central distinction survives investigation.
Several explanations supporting it do not survive unchanged.
That is the real indictment.
He set out to correct historical confusion.
Instead, he sometimes replaced difficult questions with answers that were easier to remember than to defend.
History does not become more accurate because it fits neatly onto a chart.
References
1. Original work — Three Meanings of the Word Israel. UsefulCharts, Matt Baker. Watch the original video
The primary work examined in this critique. Its historical chronology, archaeological claims, ancestry explanations, and political distinctions form the basis of the investigation.
2. Stela of Merneptah. Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. Ancient inscription, approximately 1208 BCE. Read the inscription and historical explanation
Provides the earliest known extrabiblical reference to Israel and explains why the inscription identifies Israel as a people rather than a geographical state.
3. Lester L. Grabbe, Iron Age: Tribes to Monarchy. The Oxford History of the Holy Land, Oxford University Press, March 23, 2023. View the academic chapter
Examines the historical reliability of biblical accounts of the early monarchy and distinguishes archaeological reconstruction from the Bible's portrayal of royal power. The available abstract limits examination of the chapter's full argument.
4. Shuichi Hasegawa, History and Archaeology: The Kingdom of Judah. The Oxford Handbook of the Books of Kings, Oxford University Press, June 20, 2024. View the academic chapter
Explains how Judah's history is reconstructed using archaeology, inscriptions, and critically selected biblical material rather than treating the entire Iron Age narrative as uniformly reliable. The available abstract is not a substitute for the full chapter.
5. The Assyrian Campaign in Judah as Told in the Sennacherib Prism. Israel Museum, Jerusalem, December 30, 2025. Read the museum's account
Describes the surviving Assyrian inscription and distinguishes its claims about Hezekiah and Judah from elements of the biblical account.
6. E. Mary Smallwood, The Diaspora in the Roman Period Before CE 70. The Cambridge History of Judaism, Cambridge University Press, online publication March 28, 2008. View the historical chapter
Documents the widespread Jewish communities already established throughout the Mediterranean before Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE.
7. Seth Schwartz, Diaspora, Jewish, 332 BCE–c. 600 CE. Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford University Press, March 31, 2020. Read the historical overview
Explains the diversity of ancient diaspora communities and the limits of evidence concerning migration, population size, and ancestry. The accessible abstract supports the broad historical points, not a complete demographic reconstruction.
8. Ashkenaz. Ivan G. Marcus, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Read the historical entry
Traces the emergence and geographical expansion of Ashkenazi identity, demonstrating why it cannot be treated as a fully formed ethnic division originating immediately after 70 CE.
9. Shamam Waldman and colleagues, Genome-Wide Data from Medieval German Jews Show That the Ashkenazi Founder Event Pre-Dated the 14th Century. Cell, November 30, 2022. Read the scientific paper
Reports genetic findings from 33 medieval individuals in Erfurt, including population differences, founder effects, mixed ancestry, and the uncertainty surrounding exact ancestry estimates.
10. Catherine Loy, Christian Zionism. Critical Dictionary of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, January 15, 2021. Read the research article
Establishes Christian Zionism as a distinct religious and political movement, challenging the description of Zionists as exclusively a subset of Jewish people.
11. Balfour Declaration. British Foreign Office, November 2, 1917. Historical text reproduced by the United Nations. Read the original declaration
Documents British government support for a Jewish national home in Palestine alongside its stated commitment to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.
12. Palestine Refugees. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Read UNRWA's historical figures and definitions
Establishes the agency's definition of Palestine refugees and records approximately 750,000 refugees requiring assistance when operations began in 1950.
13. Working Definition of Antisemitism. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, adopted May 26, 2016. Read the official definition
Distinguishes ordinary criticism of Israel from antisemitism while identifying collective responsibility imposed on Jews and certain attacks on Jewish self-determination as potential antisemitic manifestations.
14. Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Published March 25, 2021. Read the declaration and guidelines
Provides an alternative scholarly framework distinguishing antisemitism from various forms of criticism of Zionism, Israeli state institutions, and proposals for different political arrangements.