So this is a "fact" that my husband loves to roll out in conversation but his level of proof is pretty meager.
When he was a young boy his favorite Rabbi who he connected with over a shared love of history told him this. I think (like everyone else he says it to) that is incredibly interesting and seems to make sense on it's face.
Is there any written evidence of this?
Is there any oral history that makes this claim or ones similar to it?
Is there any archaeological evidence?
I am not looking to burst his bubble as I think he greatly enjoys his dubious connection to both Hannibal and the Carthaginians but I would like to know if there is ANTHING that backs this up.
Thank you so much for being one of the only communities on Reddit that still reminds me of the "good ol days." What you all have done and continue to do is so appreciated!
There's a certain difficulty in proving a negative. This is certainly not a claim I've ever heard or read being made, but I'll at least try and give an answer to the first question about written evidence:
Carthage was founded by settlers from Tyre, a Phoenician city which still exists to this day, in Lebanon. Though Tyre did develop close relations with Israel (the Tyrian King Hiram was supposedly a friend of King Solomon), neither the Tyrians nor the Carthaginians were Jewish: rather, they were polytheistic and followed variations on ancient Canaanite religion.
To my knowledge, there is no mention of this claim in any of the contemporary sources on the Punic Wars, nor indeed in later works such as Appian's The Punic Wars or any of Josephus' works. I'd like to narrow in on Josephus.
Now, there do appear to have been links make between the Carthaginians and Jews by people in antiquity, but these appear to be spurious: Josephus (who lived from 37CE to about 100CE, more than 180 years after the end of the destruction of Carthage) was compelled in Against Apion (which you can read here) to make a robust defence of Judaism and the history of the Jews, making repeated reference to anti-Jewish sentiment including such links being made.
But before your husband gets too excited, it should be pointed out that at no point do any of these references in any way suggest that Carthaginians converted to Judaism or indeed reference the deeds of the Carthaginians after the Punic Wars at all. Rather, Josephus refutes the suggestion by his adversary, Apion, that the founding of Carthage happened in the same year that the Jews left Egypt, with the implication that Carthage itself was founded by Jews. The Carthaginians, though long-since destroyed, were still poorly-regarded in Apion and Josephus' time, so the allusion was very much ill-meant.
Apion was spearheading an attempt by the people of Alexandria in Egypt to curtail the rights of Jews in that city, writing to the Emperor Caligula and being rather loose with the facts in this endeavour. Josephus quotes Apion describing the Jews as "being leprous, and scabby, and subject to certain other kinds of distempers" and that this is the reason for which they were expelled from Egypt. Josephus quite rightly points out that the Temple in Jerusalem in fact predates the founding of Carthage by more than a century, and that the Jews are said to have left Egypt much earlier than either of these events.
Given Apion's eagerness to link the Jews to Carthage, it would certainly seem very odd indeed that he would make no reference to Carthaginian refugees converting to Judaism if this was thought to have happened. Yet Josephus appears to feel no need to defend any such grievous assertions, implying that no such assertion was made by Apion.
I wonder if this sense of identification by the Rabbi comes from a similar place as the one expressed by Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams:
I myself had walked in Hannibal's footsteps; like him I was destined never to see Rome, and he too had gone to Campania after the whole world had expected him in Rome. Hannibal, with whom I had reached this point of similarity, had been my favourite hero during my years at the Gymnasium; like so many boys of my age, I bestowed my sympathies during the Punic war, not on the Romans, but on the Carthaginians. Then, when I came finally to understand the consequences of belonging to an alien race, and was forced by the anti-semitic sentiment among my class-mates to assume a definite attitude, the figure of the Semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my eyes. Hannibal and Rome symbolised for me as a youth the antithesis between the tenaciousness of the Jews and the organisation of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life which the anti-semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix the thoughts and impressions of that earlier time. Thus the wish to get to Rome has become the cover and symbol in my dream-life for several warmly cherished wishes, for the realisation of which one might work with the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Punic