Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry

The Khazar theory is the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews came originally from a Turkic people descended from the Medieval Khazars, a group of Eurasian nomads who established a state in what is now Southern Russia and practised Judaism. According to this theory, the Khazars had migrated westward from their collapsed Khanate into the Rhineland and had abandoned their native Khazar language, and developed Yiddish while continuing to practice Judaism.

The Khazar theory relies on Medieval sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which the ruling elite of Khazaria was said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism. The scope of the conversion within the Khanate remains uncertain, and the evidence used to tie the Ashkenazi communities to Khazars is exiguous and subject to conflicting interpretations.

In the 19th century, several scholars including Ernest Renan, a French scholar of Semitic languages, started advancing the Khazar theory. It came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976.

Notable scholars of Turkology and Jewish studies have refuted the Khazar theory, regarding it as a myth and baseless. Promoters of the theory argue that is supported by evidence, but genetic studies show no evidence of Khazar origin in Ashkenazi Jews. The theory was used by antisemite 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.

History

Abraham Eliyahu Harkavi suggested as early as 1869 that there might be a link between the Khazars and European Jews. Three years later, however, in 1872, a Crimean Karaite, Abraham Firkovich, alternatively proclaimed that his Turkic-speaking sect descended from Turkic converts to Judaism. The theory, however, that Khazar converts formed a major proportion of Ashkenazi was first proposed to a Western public by Ernest Renan in 1883. 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.

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

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."

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

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."

The idea was also taken up by the Polish-Jewish economic historian and General Zionist Yitzhak Schipper in 1918, 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", a thesis that was to have a political echo in later opinion. 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".

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. 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. 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.

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. Poliak's work found some support from Salo Wittmayer Baron and Ben-Zion Dinur, but was dismissed by Bernard Weinryb as a fiction (1962).

Salo Wittmayer Baron

Salo Wittmayer Baron, called by his biographer an "architect of Jewish history", 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). 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". 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.

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. where their cultivated presence both established Jewish communities and paved the way, ironically, for the Slavonic conversion to Christianity. 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.

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. 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. Raphael Patai, however, registered some support for the idea that Khazar remnants had played a role in the growth of Eastern European Jewish communities, and several amateur researchers, such as Boris Altschüler (1994) and Kevin Alan Brook, 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. It has been revived recently in a variety of approaches, from linguistics (Paul Wexler) to historiography (Shlomo Sand) and population genetics. (Eran Elhaik) 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.

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. Particularly after the publication of Burton J. Hendrick ‘s The Jews in America (1923) it began to enjoy a vogue among advocates of immigration restriction in the 1920s; racial theorists like Lothrop Stoddard; antisemitic conspiracy theorists like the Ku Klux Klan’s Hiram Wesley Evans; and anti-communist polemicists like John O. Beaty

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". The booklet in question, by a Roman Catholic convert from Rabbinical Judaism Benjamin H. Freedman was a rambling anti-Semitic tirade written to Dr. David Goldstein after the latter converted to Catholicism.

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. A similar position was adopted by Wilmot Robertson, whose views influenced David Duke.

According to Yehoshafat Harkabi (1968) and others, 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. It has also played some role in Soviet antisemitic chauvinism and Slavic Eurasian historiography, particularly in the works of scholars like Lev Gumilev.

Although the Khazar hypothesis never played any major role in antisemitism, and although the existence of a Jewish kingdom north of the Caucasus had formerly long been denied by Christian religious commentators, it came to be exploited by the White supremacist Christian movement and even by terrorist esoteric cults like Aum Shinrikyō. 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.

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

Genetics

See also: Genetic studies on Jews and Jewish studies

The last 15 years has seen a plethora of genetic research on Jewish populations worldwide. Harry Ostrer and Michael Hammer concluded in 2000 that most modern Jews are descended on their male side from a core population of approximately 20,000 Jewish emigrants from Italy to Central Europe over the first millennium.A 2001 study found that Jews were closer to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Assyrians, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors, whose "chromosomes might have been introduced through migrations from the Arabian Peninsula during the last two millennia."

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

In 2010, Atzmon et al. presented work claiming they had refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry. Ashkenazi Jews, part of European/Syrian Jewish populations, shared a proximity to each other and to French, Northern Italian, and Sardinian populations which was found to be incompatible with any theory maintaining that the Askhenazi were direct lineal descendants of Khazars or Slavs. They did allow that some Slavic or Khazarian admixture might have taken place during the second millennium, and noted that the 7.5% prevalence of the R1a1 haplogroup., common among Ukrainians, Russians and Sorbs, as well as among Central Asian populations, among Ashkenazi Jews has led to interpretations for a possible Slavic or Khazar admixture, although this admixture may have resulted only from mixing with Ukrainians, Poles, or Russians, rather than with the Khazars.

Writing in 2013, Jon Entine commented on Costa's results and stated that "The consensus research holds that most Ashkenazi Jews, as well as many Jews tracing their lineage to Italy, North Africa, Iraq, Iran, Kurdish regions and Yemen, share common paternal haplotypes also found among many Arabs from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria." While this consensus applies to genetic studies on the paternal Y chromosome, genetic studies on the maternal X chromosome "have proved difficult to assign to a source population," with one study showing "four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry," and at least one other study showing "a substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages." However, another study by Eva Fernandez et al. published in 2014 which studied the DNA of the Neolithic period and its modern descendants suggested that Ashkenazi Jews originated in the Ancient Near East, contrary to the conclusions of Costa (2013), but the paper also states that 78% of the K lineages of Ashkenazi Jews (the lineages studied in Costa's work and found to be European, that is K1a1b1a and K2a2) cannot be derived from the near-Eastern Neolithic samples (PPNB) they studied. The paper says that 20% of Ashkenazi K lineages (K1a9) may be derived from PPNB K lineage, but this cannot be shown by the present study. Thus, rather than proving that Ashkenazi mDNA derives from Near East, the paper only shows that the argument in Costa is not fully demonstrated concerning K1a9 lineage. The paper does present support to the claim of Eran Elhaik that Ashkenazi Jews are related to Georgians and Armenians: the paper groups Ashkenazi Jews to Cluster 2 that contains Caucasian peoples ARM, CHE, BAL, and also Cypriots.

Geneticist Eran Elhaik has argued, in two separate papers, the latest (2016) co-authored also by Wexler, that his genetic analysis strengthens the Khazar hypothesis. 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." The 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. 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.

The majority of geneticists conducting Jewish genetic experimentation 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."

In 2013, the results of the largest genetic study on Jews released by the Wayne State University found that Ashkenazi, North African, and Sephardi Jews shared substantial genetic ancestry, that they derive from Middle Eastern and European populations and found no detectable Khazar genetic origins.

In 2016 Wexler, Elhaik,and two other geneticists published a paper suggesting that that Yiddish-speaking Asjkenazi population descended from people who originally came from areas near from four villages – Iskenaz, Eskenaz, Ashanaz, and Aschuz – in north-eastern Turkey, rather than from Germanic lands as is generally argued.

Criticism

According to Jon Entine, historians and scientists believe the Khazarian theory should more accurately be called a myth. 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 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.

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. In addition, Ashkenazi Jews have been found to have a strong DNA connection to Israelites and the Middle East, sharing many common genes with other Jews from some 3000 years ago., therefore it "does not support this [Khazar conversion] idea

Using four Jewish groups, one being Ashkenazi, a Kopelman et al study found no direct evidence to the Khazar theory 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". Some scientists believe that even if the theory were to be true, "only a small minority of the Khazars may have adopted Judaism." 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".

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.

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."

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".

See also

• Conversion to Judaism
• History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union
• History of Kiev
• History of Turkish-Jewish Relations
• Jewish Polish history origins to 1600s
• Kuzari
• Rus' Khaganate
• Turkic peoples
• Turanism
• Turkic migration
• Eurasian nomads
• Genetic history of the Turkish people
• Genetic studies of Jewish origins
• Timeline of the Turkic peoples (500–1300)
• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
• Japhetic theory
• Sun Language Theory

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• Wade, Nicholas (May 9, 2000). "YChromosome Bears Witness to Story of the Jewish Diaspora". New York Times. Retrieved 11 November 2013. {{cite news}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Wade, Nicholas (October 8, 2013). "Genes Suggest European Women at Root of Ashkenazi Family Tree". New York Times. Retrieved 11 November 2013. {{cite news}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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• Wexler, Paul (2007). "Yiddish Evidence for the Khazar Component in the Ashkenazic ethnogenesis". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai,, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars:New Perspectives. Handbuch der Orientalistik: Handbook of Uralic studies. Vol. 17. BRILL. pp. 387–398. ISBN 978-90-04-16042-2. Retrieved 19 October 2013.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

External links

• Kutschera, Hugo, Freiherr von, (1909): Die Chasaren; historische Studie
• Fishberg, Maurice (1911): The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.
• The Kievan Letter scan in the Cambridge University Library collection.
• Khazaria.com
• Resources - Medieval Jewish History - The Khazars The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Khazar Historic Maps
• The Kitab al-Khazari of Judah Hallevi, full English translation at sacred-texts.com
• Ancient lost capital of the Khazar kingdom found