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Junk Science’: Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Descendants of Khazar Converts
"What do
Palestinian leaders,
white supremacists and members of the
Black Hebrew Israelite movement have in common? It’s the belief in the so-called “Khazar myth” that unites many antisemites across the ideological spectrum. In June, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh repeated this claim: “There is no connection between the Israelis and the Jews,” he
asserted. “Without going into detail – they are the Khazar Jews, who converted to Judaism in the sixth century CE,” Shtayyeh maintained.
Try to make sense of that.
His speech echoed previous statements by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who in 2018 falsely
suggested that Eastern European Jews — as opposed to Mizrachi Jews whose roots trace back to Arab countries — are “not Semites, and they have no connection to Semitism or Abraham, Jacob,” as they are supposedly descendants of proselytes from the ‘Khazar Kingdom’.”
Antisemites such as former US congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney, the
Jersey City shooter and an anchor at
Qatar’s Al Jazeera have also disseminated the libel.
By insisting that modern-day Ashkenazi Jews are actually “fake Jews,” they try to disprove the
undeniable, thousands-year-old connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. In reality, the theory surrounding the Khazarian conversion to Judaism has been dismissed — even called “junk science” — by most serious scholars.
The ‘Khazarian hypothesis’ was first popularized among the general public in 1976 by Arthur Koestler, a Jewish author and journalist born in Hungary. His now-debunked book,
The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, speculated that “the bulk of Eastern [European] Jewry — and hence world Jewry — is of Khazar-Turkish rather than Semitic origin,” implying they are not descendants of Abraham — to whom God promised the Land of Israel according to the Bible.
Khazaria was a multi-ethnic kingdom located in present-day Ukraine and Russia that existed from about the year 650 CE until 969. According to a
widely believed tale, the empire’s ruling class at some point adopted Judaism — either in the eighth or ninth century — which preceded widespread conversion among the public.
Fast forward a few hundred years, to the middle of the 13th century. The Mongols defeated Khazaria, resulting in the total collapse of the latter’s empire. That is when Koestler’s theory comes into play: The Khazars, he argued, didn’t just vanish. Instead, they ended up in countries like Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Germany, where they vastly outnumbered the existing Jewish population. His theory inferred that the Khazar population eventually grew to become the majority of world Jewry.
Poorly Researched Khazar Theory Becomes A Tool for Antisemites
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