They really are not descendants of the Phoenicians. They are Arabs. The Phoenicians were absorbed into Byzantine culture many, many years ago.

I’m quoting to you from Wikipedia: “Descendants of the Phoenicians are found today among the peoples living along the Mediterranean coast, such as the Lebanese, the inhabitants of the Maghreb, the people of Malta, and Cypriots. According to a genetic study of populations currently living in these places, about 6% of the men sampled had a Y chromosome that could be linked to Phoenician migration [32]. The Lebanese, and especially the Christian Maronite population, base Lebanese nationalism on Phoenician history.”
Their descendants are still alive today.
The Rabbi wrote that this is not comparable to the history of the Jewish people because they were spread throughout the world, with pogroms and so on.
Rabbi, the Chinese are also spread around the world.
You have Chinese people in America, in China, in Thailand, etc.
And there are other peoples too who went through pogroms—for example the Armenians (google “the Armenian genocide”), and the Aborigines who suffered genocide, etc. There are more examples.

Obviously every person living today has ancestors from all kinds of places. The uniqueness of the Jewish people is that they survived as a distinct people/group, unlike the Phoenicians, who may indeed have remnants of their DNA in various places, but certainly did not survive like the Jewish people. And I’ll repeat: the Lebanese are Arabs far more than they are Phoenicians. Lebanese nationalism and so on changes nothing in that respect. The Chinese only began spreading out in the last few centuries, and all along there were millions of them in China and they were never in danger of extinction. The Jewish people were scattered all over the world and suffered pogroms everywhere.

The Phoenicians and their neighbors also survived as a group. The fact that they don’t practice their childish pagan cult anymore doesn’t mean they survived less than we did.
If anything, we survived less. Most of the Jewish people were wiped out in the Holocaust, assimilated, the Ten Tribes disappeared from the world,
and I also don’t see how we survived as a people—the biblical form of Judaism is very different from the rabbinic Judaism of today. Back then there was only the offering of sacrifices and priestly service.
And by the way, I’m sure there are other miserable peoples too. Not just us.
You have to prove that the survival of the Jewish people is something unnatural, and not just say that the Jewish people survived!

Didn’t you read what I wrote? The Phoenicians are simply not a group.

The Phoenicians were a Semitic people who lived in the Land of Canaan, similar to the Israelites. What do you mean when you say “group”?

I’ll answer one last time because I’m tired of repeating simple facts. The Phoenicians were a people who lived in the Land of Canaan, similar to the Israelites. Their paths diverged from then on. The Israelites spread all over the world and often were not treated very well, and nevertheless preserved their distinctiveness from their surroundings and were not absorbed. After thousands of years, Jews from all over the world returned to their land.

The Phoenicians, by contrast, were absorbed into the Byzantines. By the time the Muslims conquered the region about 1,300 years ago, the Phoenicians were no longer a distinct group (I think this is even mentioned in your beloved Wikipedia). Of course they had descendants, but they became completely mixed in with the Arabs, to the point that the only way to know who they are is through DNA testing. Lebanon (which, according to Wikipedia as well, only 6% of its inhabitants have a Y chromosome that can be attributed to the Phoenicians) can say as much as it wants that it is the “continuation” of the Phoenicians, but that’s nonsense, just like the absurdities about the “Palestinian people.”

You wrote, “they were not treated very well, and nevertheless preserved their distinctiveness from their surroundings and were not absorbed.”
But they actually were absorbed. That’s why a Russian Jew resembles a Christian Russian, and an Iraqi Jew resembles an Iraqi Arab.
That shows there was a wave of converts that was added to Judaism. There really is no connection between the ancient Israelites of 3,000 years ago and today.
And it’s not true that only DNA testing revealed the Phoenicians.
There is such a thing as a Phoenician nationality, as I quoted from Wikipedia: “The Lebanese, and especially the Christian Maronite population, base Lebanese nationalism on Phoenician history.”

You keep repeating the same baseless claims. After your next comment, just read my comments in order and you’ll get an answer.
They were not absorbed; rather, converts were added to them. They did remain separate communities. There is definitely a clear genetic connection among Jews of different ethnic communities, and even a shared Y chromosome among priests.

The quote from Wikipedia proves nothing, because they really are no more connected to the Phoenicians than to the Arabs. Basing nationalism on that, etc., is nonsense in this case.

The Phoenicians were Canaanites who founded Carthage. Nobody seriously sees himself as their continuation. If anything, a more successful comparison would be the Greeks, and even there the Greeks did not abandon Greece.

I was talking about language, and one should note that local languages are usually preserved even after oppression (especially if they belong to different language families), whereas immigrants abandon their language and switch to another one. Yet the Jews remained attached to the Hebrew language and suddenly returned to it after two thousand years.

Y.D., it’s a bit strange to say that the Jews suddenly returned to Hebrew. I think most Jewish men generally knew Hebrew very well. (As testified by the thousands of books that were written. Yes yes, even before Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.)

Wondering, there is still some connection between them and the ancient Phoenicians.
Granted, it’s not all that dominant, but it still exists.
And by the way, if you want to dismiss the nationality of the Christian Maronite population, for example, then you need to bring evidence, because they rely on a tradition that they are descendants of the Phoenicians, just like we do.

Yoav,
before the nineteenth century no Maronite thought Phoenician lineage was all that significant (just as the Palestinians were not Palestinians—by the way, a word that does not exist in Arabic—before the 1960s). It was only contact with the Franks that suddenly made it important.