Japhetites Japhetites Japhetite (in adjective form Japhethitic or Japhetic) in Abrahamic religions is an obsolete historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Japheth, one of the three sons of Noah in the Bible. The other two sons of Noah, Shem and Ham, are the eponymous ancestors of the Semites and the Hamites, respectively. In medieval ethnography, the world was believed to have been divided into three large-scale racial groupings, corresponding to the three classical continents: the Semitic peoples of Asia, the Hamitic peoples of Africa and the Japhetic peoples of Europe. The term has been used in modern times as
Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chełm Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chełm Elijah Ba'al Shem or Eliyahu Ba'al Shem of Chełm (government of Lublin) (born 1550; died at Chełm, 1583) was a Polish rabbi who served as chief rabbi of Chełm. He also studied Kabbalah, and, according to his descendant Tzvi Ashkenazi, created a golem. He is credited with creating the first golem with a ""shem"" (that is, using a combination of letters from one of the names of God to form a name; Elijah used ""Sefer Yezirah""), so he was known as a "Ba'al Shem." He is the first rabbi in history to be known by