"episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour and tonality. An air of spontaneous inspiration and a sense of improvisation make it freer in form than a set of variations"As I'll show in the next several blog entries that will be dedicated to this subject, much like the art form, the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry presents dreams, a range of emotions, and fantasies that are highly contrasted with reality as has been clearly established by recent advancement in populations genetics.
But before we dwell into why this theory should be considered a complete and utter nonsense, I think a short recap of what it's all about should be our first order of business.
As a child of East European Ashkenazi Jews, and especially having family roots in Jews from Ukraine and Russia, I was introduced to the notion the Kingdom of Khazaria pretty soon after my inquiries into the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry began.
To people who might not be familiar, the Khazar theory states the following: a group of nomadic Turkic people that ruled a vast kingdom in the East European Steppe region, decided to convert to Judaism around the 8th or 9th centuries AD. There are some arguments as to whether or not this conversion was only limited to the royal court, or also included substantial parts of Khazar commons. In any case, the theory claims that after the destruction of their kingdom around the 10th-11th centuries AD by the Slavic Rus people (forefathers of modern day Ukrainians and Russians), the Jews of Khazaria were dispersed among the Slavs, adopted Slavic as their language, and later on German mixed with Slavic words, and basically became the forefathers of all or most Ashkenazi Jews, who in recent times mostly lived in nearby Eastern Europe. During the 20th century, several works have been propagating this idea, including the most famous one - The Thirteenth Tribe written by Arthur Koestler in 1976, in which he presented the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people.
The notion of being the descendant of Jewish knights fighting in Eastern Europe against both the pagan barbarians from the North and the Roman legions from the South, was really appealing to me as a teenager.
To anyone who's interested to learn about this mysterious, yet fascinating period of Jewish history, I honestly recommend to pay a visit to Kevin Brook's Khazaria.com. He really is the expert when it comes to Khazar historical affairs.
In any case, during the 20th century this Khazar hypothesis became a compelling alternative to the more traditional "Rhineland hypothesis" - which states that the forefathers of Ashkenazi Jews were Israelite Jews who were expelled by the Romans in the 1st century AD from Judea to Rome, Italy, as slaves. They then migrated to the Rhineland region, Germany in early medieval, picked up a German dialect and infused it with Hebrew and Aramaic, and later on were expelled to Eastern Europe where they adopted many Slavic words into their Germanic dialect, Yiddish. The Rhineland hypothesis gained its support from a plethora of historical evidence, showing that most Ashkenazi Jews arrived to Eastern Europe from Western and Central Europe, that there were vast Jewish communities in France and along the Rhineland during early medieval ages, and that Yiddish derives from early High German.
Both theories had their own supporters. Unfortunately, in a sharp contrast to Koestler's original intent, the Khazar theory has been hijacked in the last few decades has also been used by anti-Zionists to challenge the idea Jews have ancestral ties to ancient Israel, and it has also played a role in anti-Semitic attitudes.
In any case, up until 15 years ago, both theories, based only on interpretation of history, could have pertained to be of equal validity.
Then came along modern populations genetics.
From the early 2000s, dozens of peer reviewed publications uncovered that Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardi Jews are closer to each other than to other historically neighboring non-Jewish populations (in the case of Sephardic Jews - Iberians, in the case of Ashkenazi Jews - Germans and Slavs).
Further more, Ashkenazi Jews have been shown to have substantial Levantine genetic admixture, and the non-Levantine component seemed to be mainly of Southern European (Italian, Greek etc.) origin and not Turkic or North Caucasus.
Those findings have been further confirmed and re-validated by numerous of peer reviewed publications in the following decade and a half, among them which can be cited:
Behar et al. (2006):
Behar et al. (2008):
Behar et al. (2010):
Atzmon et al. (2010):
Bray et al. (2010):
Ostrer et al. (2013):
Costa et al. (2013):
Xue et al. (2017):
While many of these and similar scientific studies sometimes contradict and disagreed with each other on several details, they all seem be in agreement that there is no genetic evidence whatsoever that Ashkenazi Jews are Khazar converts or are particularly related to any Khazar-like people, and all of these papers strongly reaffirm that all Ashkenazi Jews are highly related to Sephardic Jews and other Western Jewish populations (more so than to any other non-Jewish population).
Unfortunately, as we will see in the following entries, all of this evidence wasn't enough to kill this theory, with some even resorting to bad science in order to keep it going. As I began this post, by quoting the definition of a rhapsody, this hypothesis and the attempt to continue promoting it are now causing few academics to run wild, come up with fantasies, contrasting reality - and all just to pursue a dead end.
So stay tune for the next entries in our Jewish Genes Khazar special.
So stay tune for the next entries in our Jewish Genes Khazar special.
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