You know, Jesus, the middle-eastern Jew.

I know it’s really popular these days to pretend Jesus for sure looked like a modern middle Eastern person, but it would be more accurate to say that we didn’t know what he looked like given the variety in how people in 1st century Judea might have looked.

For example, one of the dead sea scrolls claimed Noah was a redhead.

2 Kings 5:27 talked about how there was a subpopulation who had ancestrally transmitted skin as white as snow:

Therefore the leprosy of Naaman shall cling to you and to your descendants forever." So he went out from his presence a leper, like snow.

In fact, the biblical leprosy may have actually been skin cancer - the extensive focus on skin checks would have made more sense for a paler skinned population such as redheads who have 10-100x the melanoma risk of people without those genes.

It’s worth pointing out this all has little to do with the concept of race, given that in antiquity a number of prominent redheads appeared to be prehistory populations from North Africa - so you could have had African ancestry but redhead appearance for people in the Southern Levant.

There’s even the only extant sample of 1st century CE Jewish hair so far:

One of the more fascinating finds in this tomb, one that has not received much attention, was the preservation of a sample of Jewish male hair. The hair was lice-free, and was trimmed or cut evenly, probably indicating that the family buried in this tomb practiced good hygiene and grooming. The length of the hair was medium to short, averaging 3-4 inches. The color was reddish.

• The Only Ancient Jewish Male Hair Ever Found

You had the Nazirite population, some of whom were designated as such from birth, where the vows were taken by the sacrifice of a cow with entirely red hair and one of the prohibitions was not being allowed to cut one’s hair.

A population described as having unusually light skin in Lamentations 4:7. And with the tradition of John being a Nazirite from birth and the later tradition of James the brother of Jesus also being a lifelong Nazirite, it’s an increasingly muddied picture given our relative ignorance about the unwritten characteristics or traditions of that area and time.

TL;DR: So it’s one of these popular but inaccurate pictures of antiquity. There were likely a variety of different appearances in that area in antiquity, and the only real conclusion about Jesus being “a middle Eastern Jew in the 1st century” is that it’s an insufficient amount of information to extrapolate any kind of accurate visual depiction without additional information.