Khazar theory of Ashkenazi ancestry

The Khazar theory of Ashkenazi ancestry or Khazar myth[1][2][3] is a hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Khazars - a multi-ethnic conglomerate of Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic Khanate in what is now Southern Russia, extending from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. The theory relies on some Middle Ages' sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which at some point in the 8th-9th centuries, the ruling elite of Khazars was said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism.[4] The scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain, and the evidence used to tie the Ashkenazi communities to Khazars by descent is exiguous and subject to conflicting interpretations.[5][6]

In the late 19th century, Ernest Renan and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe had their origin in Turkic refugees that had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into the Rhineland, and exchanged their native Khazar language with the Yiddish language while continuing to practice Judaism. The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976.[7]

This theory has had a complex history within academia. Some scholars defended its plausibility, but many dismissed it as a pure fantasy. Modern geneticists, historians, and scholars of Jewish studies now largely see the Khazar theory as a baseless myth.[3] One key proponent of the theory is Eran Elhaik, who in 2012 conducted a study purporting to support the theory. In 2016 Elhaik attempted to reground the theory by combining the results of a novel method of genetic analysis that he created with the linguistic theories of Paul Wexler, another supporter of the theory.[8]

Promoters of the Khazar theory argue that is supported by evidence, but the vast majority of genetic studies show no evidence of Khazar origin in Ashkenazi Jews. The theory has been used by antisemites and anti-Zionists to claim that Ashkenazi Jews in Israel have no genetic connection to ancient Israel and thus are not a people Indigenous to Palestine.[9]

History

Abraham Eliyahu Harkavi suggested as early as 1869 that there might be a link between the Khazars and European Jews.[10] Three years later, however, in 1872, a Crimean Karaite, Abraham Firkovich, alternatively proclaimed that his Turkic-speaking sect descended from Turkic converts to Judaism.[11] The theory, however, that Khazar converts formed a major proportion of Ashkenazi was first proposed to a Western public by Ernest Renan in 1883.[12][13] In a lecture delivered in Paris before the Cercle du Saint-Simon on 27 January 1883, Renan argued that conversion played a significant role in the formation of the Jewish people, stating that:

This conversion of the kingdom of the Khazars has a considerable importance regarding the origin of those Jews who dwell in the countries along the Danube and southern Russia. These regions enclose great masses of Jewish populations which have in all probability nothing or almost nothing that is anthropologically Jewish in them.[14]

Occasional suggestions emerged that there was a small Khazar component in East European Jews in works by Joseph Jacobs (1886), Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (1893),[15] Maksymilian Ernest Gumplowicz,[16] and by the Russian-Jewish anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg.[17]

Leroy-Beaulieu, a critic of anti-Semitism who perhaps drew on Renan, queried whether or not thousands of Polish and Russian Jews might have their origins traced back to the "old nomads of the steppes."[18]

In 1909 Hugo von Kutschera developed the notion into a book-length study,[19] arguing that Khazars formed the foundational core of the modern Ashkenazi.[20] Maurice Fishberg introduced the notion to an American audience in 1911 in his book, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.[21]

When at the Versailles Peace Conference, a Jewish Zionist called Palestine the land of the Jewish people's ancestors, Joseph Reinach, a French Jewish member of parliament who was opposed to Zionism, dismissed the idea, arguing that Jews descended from Israelites were a tiny minority. In his view, conversion had played a major role in the expansion of the Jewish people, and, in addition, he claimed, the majority of "Russian, Polish and Galician Jews descend from the Khazars, a Tatar people from the south of Russia who converted to Judaism in mass at the time of Charlemagne."[22]

The idea was also taken up by the Polish-Jewish economic historian and General Zionist Yitzhak Schipper in 1918,[23][24] by scholarly anthropologists, such as Roland B. Dixon (1923), and by writers like H. G. Wells (1921) who used it to argue that "The main part of Jewry never was in Judea",[25][26] a thesis that was to have a political echo in later opinion.[27][28] In 1931 Sigmund Freud wrote to Max Eitingon that the sculptor Oscar Nemon, for whom he was sitting, showed the lineaments of a "Slavic Eastern Jew, Khazar or Kalmuck or something like that".[29]

In 1932, Samuel Krauss ventured the theory that the biblical Ashkenaz referred to northern Asia Minor, and identified it with the Khazars, a position immediately disputed by Jacob Mann.[30] Ten years later, in 1942, Abraham N. Poliak, later professor of the history of the Middle Ages at Tel Aviv University, published a Hebrew monograph in which he concluded that the East European Jews came from Khazaria.[31][32] D.M. Dunlop, writing in 1954, thought very little evidence backed what he regarded as a mere assumption, and argued that the Ashkenazi-Khazar descent theory went far beyond what "our imperfect records" permit.[33]

Léon Poliakov, while assuming the Jews of Western Europe resulted from a "panmixia" in the first millennium, asserted in 1955 that it was widely assumed that Europe's Eastern Jews descended from a mixture of Khazarian and German Jews.[34] Poliak's work found some support from Salo Wittmayer Baron and Ben-Zion Dinur,[35][36] but was dismissed by Bernard Weinryb as a fiction (1962).[37]

Salo Wittmayer Baron

Salo Wittmayer Baron, called by his biographer an "architect of Jewish history",[38] devoted a large part of a chapter in his Social and Religious History of the Jews to the Khazarian Jewish state, and the impact he believed that community exercised on the formation of East European Jewries in his Social and Religious History of the Jews (1957).[39] The scarcity of direct Jewish testimonies did not disconcert Baron: this was to be expected since medieval Jews were "generally inarticulate outside their main centers of learning".[40] The Khazarian turn to Judaism was, he judged, the "largest and last mass conversion", involving both the royal house and large sectors of the population. Jews migrated there to flee the recurrent intolerance against Jews and the geopolitical upheavals of the region's chronic wars, which often proved devastating to northern Asia Minor, between Byzantium, Sassanid Persia, and the Abbasid and Ummayad Caliphates.[41]

For Baron, the fact of Jewish Khazaria played a lively role in stirring up among Western Jews an image of "red Jews", and among Jews in Islamic countries a beacon of hope. After the dissolution of Khazaria, Baron sees a diaspora drifting both north into Russia, Poland and the Ukraine, and westwards into Pannonia and the Balkan lands.[42] where their cultivated presence both established Jewish communities and paved the way, ironically, for the Slavonic conversion to Christianity.[43] By the 11th and 12th centuries, these Eastern Jews make their first appearance in the Jewish literature of France and Germany. Maimonides, bemoaning the neglect of learning in the East, laid his hopes for the perpetuation of Jewish learning in the young struggling communities of Europe but would, Baron concludes, have been surprised to find that within centuries precisely in Eastern Europe would arise thriving communities that were to assume leadership of the Jewish people itself.[44]

Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. and contemporary views

The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976.[7] Koestler's work was both positively and negatively reviewed. Israel’s ambassador to Britain branded the book "an anti-Semitic action financed by the Palestinians", while Bernard Lewis claimed that the idea was not supported by any evidence whatsoever, and had been abandoned by all serious scholars.[7][45] Raphael Patai, however, registered some support for the idea that Khazar remnants had played a role in the growth of Eastern European Jewish communities,[46] and several amateur researchers, such as Boris Altschüler (1994)[47] and Kevin Alan Brook,[48] kept the thesis in the public eye. Koestler argued that this theory would mitigate European racially-based antisemitism.

The theory has been used to counter the concept of Jewish nationhood.[7][49] It has been revived recently in a variety of approaches, from linguistics (Paul Wexler)[50] to historiography (Shlomo Sand)[51] and population genetics. (Eran Elhaik)[52] In broad academic perspective, both the idea that the Khazars converted en masse to Judaism, and the suggestion they emigrated to form the core population of Ashkenazi Jewry, remain highly polemical issues.[53]

Use in antisemitic polemics

Maurice Fishberg and Roland B Dixon’s works were later exploited in racist and religious polemical literature in both Britain, in British Israelism, and the United States.[54] Particularly after the publication of Burton J. Hendrick ‘s The Jews in America (1923)[55] it began to enjoy a vogue among advocates of immigration restriction in the 1920s; racial theorists[56] like Lothrop Stoddard; antisemitic conspiracy theorists like the Ku Klux Klan’s Hiram Wesley Evans; and anti-communist polemicists like John O. Beaty[57]

In 1938, Ezra Pound, then strongly identified with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, sent a query to fellow poet Louis Zukofsky concerning the Khazars after someone had written to him that the ancient Jews had died out and modern Jews were of Khazar descent. He returned to the issue in 1955, apparently influenced by a book called Facts are Facts, which pushed the Jewish-Khazar descent theory, and which for Pound had dug up "a few savoury morsels".[58] The booklet in question, by a Roman Catholic convert from Rabbinical Judaism Benjamin H. Freedman[59] was a rambling anti-Semitic tirade written to Dr. David Goldstein after the latter converted to Catholicism.[60]

John O. Beaty was an antisemitic, McCarthyite professor of Old English at SMU, author of ‘The Iron Curtain over America, (Dallas 1952). According to him, "the Khazar Jews were responsible for all of America’s – and the world’s ills," beginning with World War 1. The book had little impact until the former Wall Street broker and oil tycoon J. Russell Maguire promoted it.[61] A similar position was adopted by Wilmot Robertson, whose views influenced David Duke.[62]

According to Yehoshafat Harkabi (1968) and others,[63] it played a role in Arab anti-Zionist polemics, and took on an antisemitic edge. Bernard Lewis, noting in 1987 that Arab scholars had dropped it, remarked that it only occasionally emerged in Arab political discourse.[64] It has also played some role in Soviet antisemitic chauvinism[65] and Slavic Eurasian historiography, particularly in the works of scholars like Lev Gumilev.[66]

Although the Khazar hypothesis never played any major role in antisemitism,[67][68] and although the existence of a Jewish kingdom north of the Caucasus had formerly long been denied by Christian religious commentators,[69] it came to be exploited by the White supremacist Christian movement [70] and even by terrorist esoteric cults like Aum Shinrikyō.[71] The Christian Identity movement, which took shape from the 1940s to the 1970s, had its roots in British Israelism which had been planted on American evangelical soil in the late 19th century.[72]

The theory, which claims that today's Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of Khazar converts to Judaism, is popular on Internet anti-Semitic websites.[73]

Genetics and the Khazar theory

After major advances in DNA sequence analysis and computing technology in the late 20th and early 21st century, a plethora of genetic research on Jewish and other human populations has been conducted worldwide. While the consensus in genetic research is that the world's Jewish populations (including the Ashkenazim) share substantial genetic ancestry derived from a common Ancient Middle Eastern founder population, and that Ashkenazi Jews have no genetic ancestry attributable to Khazars,[74] a few studies authored in this period diverge from the majority view in favor of the Khazar theory.

A 2003 study of the Y chromosome by Behar et al. pointed to multiple origins for Ashkenazi Levites, a priestly class who comprise approximately 4% of Ashkenazi Jews. It found that haplogroup R1a1a (R-M17), which is uncommon in the Middle East or among Sephardi Jews, but dominant in Eastern Europe, is present in over 50% of Ashkenazi Levites, while the rest of Ashkenazi Levites' paternal lineage is of apparent Middle Eastern origin. In comparison, the haplotype is very rare among Ashkenazi Cohanim (1.7%). Behar suggested a founding event, probably involving one or very few European men, occurring at a time close to the initial formation and settlement of the Ashkenazi community as a possible explanation.

It has been suggested that subjects of the Khazar Empire (located to the northeast of the Black Sea), who had adopted Judaism in the last quarter of the first millennium c.e., were an important constituent of the nascent Ashkenazi community. If a European origin for the Ashkenazi Levite haplogroup R1a1 component is accepted as a reasonable possibility, it is of interest to speculate further on the possible timing, location, and mechanism of this event. Because the modal haplotype of haplogroup R1a1 found in the Ashkenazi Levites is found at reasonably high frequency throughout the eastern European region, it is not possible to use genetic information to pinpoint the exact origin of any putative founder from the currently available data sets. Intriguingly, the Sorbian tongue, relexified with a German vocabulary, has been proposed as the origin of Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazim, but there has been no suggestion of an association between Ashkenazi Levites in particular and the Sorbian language. One attractive source would be the Khazarian Kingdom, whose ruling class is thought to have converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century, This kingdom flourished between the years 700 c.e. and 1016 c.e. It extended from northern Georgia in the south to Bulgar on the Volga River in the north and from the Aral Sea in the east to the Dnieper River in the west—an area that falls within a region in which haplogroup R1a1 NRYs are found at high frequency. . . Although neither the NRY haplogroup composition of the majority of Ashkenazi Jews nor the microsatellite haplotype composition of the R1a1 haplogroup within Ashkenazi Levites is consistent with a major Khazar or other European origin, as has been speculated by some authors, one cannot rule out the important contribution of a single or a few founders among contemporary Ashkenazi Levites.'[75]

Nebel, Behar and Goldstein speculate that this may indicate a Khazar origin,[76] with Goldstein saying the Khazar theory "now seems to me plausible, if not likely".[77]

A 2013 study by Rootsi et al. found that R1a-M582, the specific subclade of R1a to which all sampled Ashkenazi Levites with R1a belonged, was completely absent of a sample of 922 Eastern Europeans and was only found in one of the 2,164 samples from the Caucasus, while it made up 33.8% of non-Levite Ashkenazi R1a and was also found in 5.9% of Near Easterners bearing R1a. The clade, though less represented in Near Easterners, was more diverse among them than among Ashkenazi Jews. Rootsi et al. argued this supports a Near Eastern Hebrew origin for the paternal lineage R1a present among Ashkenazi Levites:[78] R1a-M582 was also found among different Iranian populations, among Kurds from Cilician Anatolia and Kazakhstan, and among non-Ashkenazi Jews.

"Previous Y-chromosome studies have demonstrated that Ashkenazi Levites, members of a paternally inherited Jewish priestly caste, display a distinctive founder event within R1a, the most prevalent Y-chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europe. Here we report the analysis of 16 whole R1 sequences and show that a set of 19 unique nucleotide substitutions defines the Ashkenazi R1a lineage. While our survey of one of these, M582, in 2,834 R1a samples reveals its absence in 922 Eastern Europeans, we show it is present in all sampled R1a Ashkenazi Levites, as well as in 33.8% of other R1a Ashkenazi Jewish males and 5.9% of 303 R1a Near Eastern males, where it shows considerably higher diversity. Moreover, the M582 lineage also occurs at low frequencies in non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations. In contrast to the previously suggested Eastern European origin for Ashkenazi Levites, the current data are indicative of a geographic source of the Levite founder lineage in the Near East and its likely presence among pre-Diaspora Hebrews."[78]

Geneticist Eran Elhaik has argued, in two separate papers, the first in 2012 and the latest (2016) co-authored by Wexler, that his genetic analysis strengthens the Khazar hypothesis. Of the 2012 study Elhaik writes: "Strong evidence for the Khazarian hypothesis is the clustering of European Jews with the populations that reside on opposite ends of ancient Khazaria: Armenians, Georgians, and Azerbaijani Jews. Because Caucasus populations remained relatively isolated in the Caucasus region and because there are no records of Caucasus populations mass-migrating to Eastern and Central Europe prior to the fall of Khazaria (Balanovsky et al. 2011), these findings imply a shared origin for European Jews and Caucasus populations."[79] In the 2016 study Wexler, Elhaik, et al. argued that the first Ashkenazi populations to speak the Yiddish language came from areas near four villages in Eastern Turkey along the Silk Road, rather than from Germanic lands as is the general consensus in scholarship.[80][81]

Criticism

According to Jon Entine, historians and scientists believe the Khazarian theory should more accurately be called a myth.[82] A 2013 study of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA found no significant evidence of Khazar contribution to the Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, as would be predicted by the Khazar hypothesis[83] and although there is no historical or DNA evidence to support the Khazar idea, Alan Unterman maintains that it is still popular in some Arab states.[84]

The strong claim that Ashkenazis as a whole take their origin from Khazars has been widely criticized as there is no direct evidence to support it.[85][86] In addition, Ashkenazi Jews have been found to have a strong genetic connection to the Middle East,[87] sharing many common genes with other Jews from some 3000 years ago,[88][89] therefore it "does not support this [Khazar conversion] idea[90]

Using four Jewish groups, one being Ashkenazi, a Kopelman et al study found no direct evidence to the Khazar theory[91] while another research concluded that its findings "debunk one of the most questionable, but still tenacious, hypotheses: that most Ashkenazi Jews can trace their roots to the mysterious Khazar Kingdom that flourished during the ninth century in the region between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire".[92] Some scientists believe that even if the theory were to be true, "only a small minority of the Khazars may have adopted Judaism."[93] and that "the questions of whether there was a Khazar contribution to the Ashkenazi Jews' lineage, or exactly what percentage of mitochondrial variants emanate from Europe, cannot be answered with certainty using present genetic and geographical data".[94]

Nadine Epstein, an editor and executive publisher of Moment magazine said "When I read Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe, I bought his theory that Ashkenazim were descended from the Khazars ... But in 1997, Karl Skorecki in Haifa, Michael Hammer in Tucson and several London researchers surprised everyone by finding evidence of the Jewish priestly line of males, the Kohanim. Half of Ashkenazic men and slightly more than half of Sephardic men who claimed to be Kohanim were found to have a distinctive set of genetic markers on their Y chromosome, making it highly possible that they are descendants of a single male or group of related males who lived between 1180 and 650 B.C.E., about the time of Moses and Aaron.[94]

In 2000, the analysis of a report by Nicholas Wade named Y Chromosome Bears Witness to Story of the Jewish Diaspora "provided genetic witness that these [Jewish] communities have, to a remarkable extent, retained their biological identity separate from their host populations, evidence of relatively little intermarriage or conversion into Judaism over the centuries.... The results accord with Jewish history and tradition and refute theories like those holding that Jewish communities consist mostly of converts from other faiths, or that they are descended from the Khazars, a medieval Turkish tribe that adopted Judaism."[94]

In June 2014, Shaul Stampfer published a lengthy paper challenging the theory as ungrounded in sources contemporary with the Khazar period, stating: "Such a conversion, even though it’s a wonderful story, never happened".[95][96]

Elhaik's 2012 study was criticized for its use of Armenians and Azerbaijani Jews as proxies for Khazars and for using Beduin and Jordanian Hashemites as a proxy for the Ancient Israelites. The former decision was criticized because Armenians were assumed to have a monolithic Caucasian ancestry, when as an Anatolian people (rather than Turkic) they contain many genetically Middle Eastern elements. Azerbaijani Jews are also assumed for the purposes of the study to have Khazarian ancestry. The decision to cast Bedouin/Hashemites as "proto-Jews" was especially seen as political in nature, considering that both have origins in Arab tribes from the Arabian Peninsula rather than from the Ancient Israelites, while the descent of the Jews from the Israelites is largely accepted. [97][98] The study was also criticized as interpreting information selectively—The study found far more genetic similarity between the Druze and Ashkenazim than the Ashkenazim and Armenians, but Elhaik rejected this as indicating a common Semitic origin, instead interpreting it as evidence of Druze having Turkic origins when they are known to come from Syria.

Geneticists conducting studies in Jewish genetics have challenged Elhaik's methods in his first paper. Michael Hammer called Elhaik's premise "unrealistic," calling Elhaik and other Khazarian hypothesis proponents "outlier folks… who have a minority view that’s not supported scientifically. I think the arguments they make are pretty weak and stretching what we know." Marcus Feldman, director of Stanford University's Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, echoes Hammer. "If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years… there’s no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin," he said. He added that Elhaik’s first paper "is sort of a one-off." Elhaik’s statistical analysis would not pass muster with most contemporary scholars, Feldman said: "He appears to be applying the statistics in a way that gives him different results from what everybody else has obtained from essentially similar data."[99] Elhaik aggressively defended his study from the more mainstream scientists who refuted his work, attacking critics as "Nazi sympathizers".[3]

Elhaik and Wexler's 2016 study was dismissed by two prominent scholars of Jewish demography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shaul Stampfer, a professor of Soviet and East European Jewry, deemed it “basically nonsense.” Sergio DellaPergola, the primary demographer of the Jewish people at the university, called it a "falsification", criticizing its methodology, using a small population size and selectively removing population groups that refuted the findings they wanted, namely other Jewish groups such as the Italkim and Sephardic Jews, to whom Ashkenazi Jews are closely related genetically. “Serious research would have factored in the glaring genetic similarity between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, which mean Polish Jews are more genetically similar to Iraqi Jews than to a non-Jewish Pole.”[100]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Plaut, Steven (9 May 2007). "The Khazar Myth and the New Anti-Semitism". The Jewish Press. Retrieved 2 May 2016.
  2. ↑ "Terra Incognita: The return of the Khazar myth". The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. Retrieved 2 May 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 Entine, Jon. "Israeli Researcher Challenges Jewish DNA links to Israel, Calls Those Who Disagree 'Nazi Sympathizers'". Forbes. Retrieved 2 May 2016.
  4. ↑ Golden 2007a, p. 149
  5. ↑
  6. ↑
  7. 1 2 3 4 Sand 2010, p. 240.
  8. ↑ The Mystery of the Origins of Yiddish Will Never Be Solved
  9. ↑ Yanover, Yori. "Study Finds No Evidence of Khazar Origin for Ashkenazi Jews". The Jewish Press. Retrieved 25 April 2016.
  10. ↑ Rossman 2002, p. 98: Abraham Harkavy, O yazykye evreyev, zhivshikh v drevneye vremya na Rusi i o slavianskikh slovakh, vstrechaiuschikhsia u evreiskikh pisatelei, St. Petersburg.
  11. ↑ Nathans 1999, p. 409.
  12. ↑ Barkun 1997, p. 137: Ernest Renan, "Judaism as a Race and as Religion." Delivered on the January 27, 1883.
  13. ↑ Rossman 2002, p. 98.
  14. ↑ Renan 1883:Cette conversion du royaume des Khozars a une importance considérable dans la question de l’origine des juifs qui habitent les pays danubiens et le midi de la Russie. Ces régions renferment de grandes masses de populations juives qui n’ont probablement rien ou presque rien d’ethnographiquement juif.'
  15. ↑ Singerman 2004, pp. 3–4, Israël chez les nations (1893):Eng.Israel Among the Nations (1895).
  16. ↑ Polonsky, Basista & Link-Lenczowski 1993, p. 120. In the book Początki religii żydowskiej w Polsce, Warsaw: E. Wende i S-ka, 1903.
  17. ↑ Goldstein 2006, p. 131.Goldstein writes: ‘The theory that Eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars was originally proposed by . .Samuel Weissenberg in an attempt to show that Jews were deeply rooted on Russian soil and that the cradle of Jewish civilization was the Caucasus’. Weissenberg’s book Die Südrussischen Juden, was published in 1895.
  18. ↑ Singerman 1998, p. 347
  19. ↑ Koestler 1976, pp. 134,150. Die Chasaren; historische Studie, A. Holzhauen,Vienna 1909.2nd ed., 1910.
  20. ↑ Koestler 1976, pp. 134,150.
  21. ↑ Goldstein 2006, p. 131. Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.
  22. ↑ John Quigley, Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice, Duke University Press, 1990 p.71
  23. ↑ Litman 1984, pp. 85–110,109. Schipper’s first monograph on this was published in the Almanach Žydowski (Vienna) in 1918, While in the Warsaw ghetto before falling victim to the Holocaust at Majdanek, Schipper (1884-1943) was working on the Khazar hypothesis.
  24. ↑ Brook 2009, p. 210.
  25. ↑ Wells 2004, p. 2:"There were Arab tribes who were Jews in the time of Muhammad, and a Turkic people who were mainly Jews in South Russia in the ninth century. Judaism is indeed the reconstructed political ideal of many shattered peoples-mainly semitic. As a result of these coalescences and assimilations, almost everywhere in the towns throughout the Roman Empire, and far beyond it in the east, Jewish communities traded and flourished, and were kept in touch through the Bible, and through a religious and educational organization. The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea."
  26. ↑ Singerman 2004, p. 4.
  27. ↑ Morris 2003, p. 22: Pasha Glubb held that Russian Jews ‘have considerably less Middle Eastern blood, consisting largely of pagan Slav proselytes or of Khazar Turks.’ For Glubb, they were not 'descendants of the Judeans . .The Arabs of Palestine are probably more closely related to the Judeans (genetically) than are modern Russian or German Jews'. . 'Of course, an anti-Zionist (as well as an anti-Semitic) point is being made here: The Palestinians have a greater political right to Palestine than the Jews do, as they, not the modern-day Jews, are the true descendants of the land's Jewish inhabitants/owners'.
  28. ↑ Roland Burrage Dixon The Racial History of Man, 1923; H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (1921)
  29. ↑ Gilman 1995, p. 30.
  30. ↑ Malkiel 2008, p. 263,n.1.
  31. ↑ Golden 2007a, p. 29. 'Poliak sought the origins of Eastern European Jewry in Khazaria'. First written as an article, then as a monograph (1942), it was twice revised in 1944, and 1951 as Kazariyah: Toldot mamlaxa yehudit (Khazaria:The History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe) Mosad Bialik, Tel Aviv, 1951.
  32. ↑ Sand 2010, p. 234.
  33. ↑ Dunlop 1954, pp. 261,263.
  34. ↑ Poliakov 2005, p. 285:'As for the Jews of Eastern Europe (Poles, Russians, etc.,) it has always been assumed that they descended from an amalgamation of Jews of Khazar stock from southern Russia and German Jews (the latter having imposed their superior culture).'
  35. ↑ Sand 2010, pp. 241–2. Sand cites Salo Wittmayer Baron,Baron 1957, pp. 196–206, p.206:'before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish center of Eastern Europe'; and Ben-Zion Dinur, Yisrael ba-gola 5 vols., 3rd ed. (1961-1966)Tel-Aviv: Jerusalem:Dvir;Bialik Institute, 1961. (OCLC:492532282) vol.1 p.2,5:'The Russian conquests did not destroy the Khazar kingdom entirely, but they broke it up and diminished it And this kingdom, which had absorbed Jewish immigration and refugees from many exiles, must itself have become a diaspora mother, the mother of one of the greatest of the diasporas (Em-galuyot, em akhat hagaluyot hagdolot)-of Israel in Russia, Lithuania and Poland.'
  36. ↑ Golden 2007a, p. 55:’Salo Baron, who incorrectly viewed them as Finno-Ugrians, believed that the Khazars "sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centers of eastern Europe’
  37. ↑ Golden 2007a, p. 55:’dismissed. . .rather airily’.
  38. ↑ Liberles 1995.
  39. ↑ Baron 1957, pp. 196–222.
  40. ↑ Baron 1957, p. 196.
  41. ↑ Baron 1957, p. 197.
  42. ↑ Baron 1957, pp. 206–207
  43. ↑ Baron 1957, pp. 208–210,221.
  44. ↑ Bacon 1957, pp. 173,222
  45. ↑ Lewis 1987, p. 48:'Some limit this denial to European Jews and make use of the theory that the Jews of Europe are not of Israelite descent at all but are the offspring of a tribe of Central Asian Turks converted to Judaism, called the Khazars. This theory, first put forward by an Austrian anthropologist in the early years of this century, is supported by no evidence whatsoever. It has long since been abandoned by all serious scholars in the field, including those in Arab countries, where Khazar theory is little used except in occasional political polemics.' Assertions of this kind has been challenged by Paul WexlerWexler 2002, pp. 538 who also notes that the arguments on this issue are riven by contrasting ideological investments: "Most writers who have supported the Ashkenazi-Khazar hypothesis have not argued their claims in a convincing manner ... The opponents of the Khazar-Ashkenazi nexus are no less guilty of empty polemics and unconvincing arguments."(p.537)).
  46. ↑ Patai & Patai 1989, p. 71: "it is assumed by all historians that those Jewish Khazars who survived the last fateful decades sought and found refuge in the bosom of Jewish communities in the Christian countries to the west, and especially in Russia and Poland, on the one hand, and in the Muslim countries to the east and the south, on the other. Some historians and anthropologists go so far as to consider the modern Jews of East Europe, and more particularly of Poland, the descendants of the medieval Khazars."
  47. ↑ Golden 2007a, p. 9
  48. ↑ Brook 2009
  49. ↑ Toch 2012, p. 155,n.4.
  50. ↑ Wexler 2007, pp. 387–398.
  51. ↑ Sand 2010, pp. 190–249.
  52. ↑ Elhaik 2012, pp. 61–74.
  53. ↑ Golden 2007, pp. 9–10.
  54. ↑ Goldstein 2006, p. 131.
  55. ↑ Singerman 2004, pp. 4–5.
  56. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke 2002, p. 237.
  57. ↑ Boller 1992, pp. 2,6–7; Barkun 1997, pp. 141–2.
  58. ↑ Pound & Zukovsky 1987, p. xxi, citing letterd of 10 July 1938 and 24/25 September 1955. Ahearn speculates that Pound may have thought:'If there were no such people as Jews, then the problem of indiscriminate anti-Semitism would disappear. On could focus one’s attention on usurers of whatever description.'
  59. ↑ Freedman 1955
  60. ↑ Kaplan 1997, p. 191 n.3.
  61. ↑ Boller 2013, p. 14
  62. ↑ Barkun 1997, pp. 140–141. His ’Dispossessed Majority(1972)
  63. ↑ Wexler 2002, p. 514 has a more detailed bibliography.
  64. ↑ Harkabi 1987, p. 424:"Arab anti-Semitism might have been expected to be free from the idea of racial odium, since Jews and Arabs are both regarded by race theory as Semites, but the odium is directed, not against the Semitic race, but against the Jews as a historical group. The main idea is that the Jews, racially, are a mongrel community, most of them being not Semites, but of Khazar and European origin." This essay was translated from Harkabi Hebrew text 'Arab Antisemitism' in Shmuel Ettinger, Continuity and Discontinuity in Antisemitism, (Hebrew) 1968 (p.50).
  65. ↑ Shnirelman 2007, pp. 353–372:'in the very late 1980s Russian nationalists were fixated on the "Khazar episode." For them the Khazar issue seemed to be a crucial one. They treated it as the first historically documented case of the imposition of a foreign yoke on the Slavs, .. In this context the term "Khazars" became popular as a euphemism for the so-called "Jewish occupation regime." (p.354)
  66. ↑ Rossman 2007, pp. 121–188.
  67. ↑ Barkun 1997, pp. 136–7:'The Khazar theory never figured as a major component of anti-Semitism. Indeed, it receives only scant attention in Léon Poliakov’s monumental history of the subject.’
  68. ↑ Barkun 2012, p. 165:'Although the Khazar theory gets surprisingly little attention in scholarly histories of anti-Semitism, it has been an influential theme among American anti-Semites since the immigration restrictionists of the 1920s,'.
  69. ↑ Gow 1995, pp. 30–31, n.28.
  70. ↑ Barkun 1997, pp. 142–144.
  71. ↑ Goodman & Miyazawi 2000, pp. 263–264
  72. ↑ Gardell 2002, p. 165.'The formative period of Christian Identity could roughly be said to be the three decades between 1940 and 1970. Through missionaries like Wesley Swift, Bertrand Comparet and William Potter Gale, it took on a white racialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and a far-right conservative political outlook. Combined with the teachings of early disciples Richard G. Butler, Colonel Jack Mohr and James K. Warner, a distinct racist theology was gradually formed. Whites were said to be the Adamic people, created in His likeness. A notion of a pre-earthly existence is found in an important substratum, teaching that whites either had a spiritual or extraterrestrial pre-existence. Blacks were either pre-Adamic soulless creatures or represented fallen, evil spirits, but they were not the chief target of fear and hatred. This position was reserved for Jews. The latent anti-Semitism found in British-Israelism rose to prominence. Jews were, at best, reduced to mongrelized imposters, not infrequently identified with Eurasian Khazars without any legitimate claim to a closeness with God, and at worst denounced as the offspring of Satan.'
  73. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. "Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity". Retrieved 9 November 2013.
  74. ↑ Behar, Doron M.; Metspalu, Mait; Baran, Yael; Kopelman, Naama M.; Yunusbayev, Bayazit; Gladstein, Ariella; Tzur, Shay; Sahakyan, Havhannes; Bahmanimehr, Ardeshir; Yepiskoposyan, Levon; Tambets, Kristiina; Khusnutdinova, Elza K.; Kusniarevich, Aljona; Balanovsky, Oleg; Balanovsky, Elena; Kovacevic, Lejla; Marjanovic, Damir; Mihailov, Evelin; Kouvatsi, Anastasia; Traintaphyllidis, Costas; King, Roy J.; Semino, Ornella; Torroni, Antonio; Hammer, Michael F.; Metspalu, Ene; Skorecki, Karl; Rosset, Saharon; Halperin, Eran; Villems, Richard; Rosenberg, Noah A. (2013). "No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews". Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints (Wayne State University) (41). Retrieved October 14, 2014. Final version at http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol/vol85/iss6/9/
  75. ↑ Behar DM, Thomas MG, Skorecki K, et al. (October 2003). "Multiple origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y chromosome evidence for both Near Eastern and European ancestries". American Journal of Human Genetics 73 (4): 768–779. doi:10.1086/378506. PMC 1180600. PMID 13680527.
  76. ↑ Goldstein, David B. (2008). "3". Jacob's legacy: A genetic view of Jewish history. Yale University Press. pp. location 873 (Kindle for PC). ISBN 978-0-300-12583-2.
  77. ↑ Goldstein, David B. (2008). "3". Jacob's legacy: A genetic view of Jewish history. Yale University Press. p. 74. ISBN 978-0-300-12583-2.
  78. 1 2 Rootsi, Siiri; et al. (17 December 2013). "Phylogenetic applications of whole Y-chromosome sequences and the Near Eastern origin of Ashkenazi Levites.". Nature Communications 4. doi:10.1038/ncomms3928.
  79. ↑ http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/1/61.full
  80. ↑ Burgess, Matt (20 April 2016). "Yiddish may have originated in Turkey, not Germany". Wired.co.uk.
  81. ↑ Das, R.; Wexler, P.; Pirooznia, M.; Elhaik, E. (2016). "Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to primeval villages in the ancient Iranian lands of Ashkenaz". Genome Biology and Evolution 8 (4): 1132–1149.
  82. ↑ Entine, Jon. "Israeli Researcher Challenges Jewish DNA links to Israel, Calls Those Who Disagree 'Nazi Sympathizers'", Forbes, May 16, 2013
  83. ↑ "A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages" (PDF). Nature Communications. Retrieved 8 November 2013.
  84. ↑ Unterman, Alan (2010). Historical Dictionary of the Jews. Scarecrow Press. p. 98.
  85. ↑ Melissa Hogenboom, 'European link to Jewish maternal ancestry BBC News, 9 October 2013.
  86. ↑ "No indication of Khazar genetic ancestry among Ashkenazi Jews". ASHG. Retrieved 5 November 2013.
  87. ↑ Middle East origins:
  88. ↑ Wade, Nicholas (June 9, 2010). "Studies Show Jews’ Genetic Similarity". New York Times. Retrieved 8 November 2013.
  89. ↑ "Who Are the Jews? Genetic Studies Spark Identity Debate" (PDF). Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Retrieved 9 November 2013.
  90. ↑ "Jews worldwide share genetic ties". Nature (journal). 3 June 2010. Retrieved 9 November 2013.
  91. ↑ Kopelman, NM; Stone, L; Wang, C; et al. (2009). "Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations". BMC Genetics 10: 80. doi:10.1186/1471-2156-10-80. PMC 2797531. PMID 19995433.
  92. ↑ "New Study Finds Most Ashkenazi Jews Genetically Linked to Europe". Jewishvoiceny.com. 2013-10-16. Retrieved 2013-10-31.
  93. ↑ "Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations". Retrieved 9 November 2013.
  94. 1 2 3 "Jewish Genetics: Abstracts and Summaries". Retrieved 9 November 2013.
  95. ↑ Shaul Stampfer, "Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism?," Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 19 (3) pp.1–72
  96. ↑ Aderet, Ofer (26 June 2014). "Jews are not descended from Khazars, Hebrew University historian says". Haaretz. Retrieved 1 October 2014.
  97. ↑ Terra Incognita: Return of the Khazar Myth
  98. ↑ [digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=humbiol_preprints No Evidence of Genome Wide Khazar Origin of Modern Jews]
  99. ↑ Rita Rubin, 'Jews a Race' Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert,' The Forward 7 May 2013.
  100. ↑ Prominent scholars blast theory tracing Ashkenazi Jews to Turkey

References

(Jeffrey Kaplan Syracuse University Press 1997) p. 191 n.3

External links

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