From: sethr@cbnewsl.cb.att.com (seth.r.rosenthal)
Subject: Re: The Thirteenth Tribe
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 14:25:11 GMT
Keywords: Koestler, Khazar

In article <1993Jan19.181053.24185@watson.ibm.com>, picheny@watson.ibm.com (MA.Picheny;340090) writes:
> A friend of mine is asking me questions about this book. I seem 
> to remember reading various rebuttals to the thesis advocated 
> namely that we are all (we being Eastern European Askenazim)
> decended from the Khazars, Can anyone point me to such a discussion
> or fill me in on the details?
> 
> Michael Picheny

There is an FAQ item concerning this, but since this is an interest
of mine let me summarize.

The validity of the "Khazar hypothesis" depends on what you think
that hypothesis is.  Is it "All Eastern European Jews are
descended from the Khazars"?  If so, an equally good argument
can be made that all Eastern European Jews are descended from
King David.  Mathematically these two hypotheses are just as
likely.  If the hypothesis is that converts exist in the background
of Eastern European Jews, and the Khazars are a group that converted
and became Jews, the answer is probably yes.  If the hypothesis is
that we are solely or even mostly Khazar, this is quite easy to refute,
Koestler notwithstanding.

The History:

There was a tribe called Khazars (in Arabic, Al-Kuzari)
who migrated to and conquered
the Southern Russian steppes from the Caspian Sea to about modern
Kiev.  They were a Turkic people who came with the general waves
of Turks in the 5th-7th centuries.  Their ruling classes were
said to be related to Genghis Khan.  They conquered and made
alliances with the surrounding peoples, were quite war-like
and successful at war, and defeated both the Byzantines and
the Abbasid Caliphate in various wars.  In this way they did
the same for Eastern Europe that Charlemagne did for Western
Europe.  Mention is made of them in Arab travelogues, and
in the fragmentary remains of the writings of the Sephardic
adviser to the Omayyad Caliph Abdulrahman III, Hasdai Ibn Shaprut.
These are the prime sources of reliable information about the
Khazars.  In Halevy's Al-Khuzari, he uses the legends of Khazar
conversion as a defense of Judaism against Islam and Christianity.
Contacts were maintained between various Jewries and the Khazars,
and Byzantine Jewry frequently escaped persecution from the
Christian Emperors by fleeing to Khazaria.  The Khazar conversions
were mainly the Imperial family and the nobility of the Khazars,
and Islamic theologians and St. Ibo (sp?) who visited them and wrote of them
during the post conversion period don't even mention their Jewishness.
In Hasdai Ibn Shaprut's (HIbS if I need to use it again) correspondences
we find letters addressed to the Khazars that were to be conveyed
by German, Hungarian and other existing 9th century Eastern European
Jewries, showing that Judaism existed in Eastern Europe prior to any
Khazar migrations.  The 9th century German Jews had written to HIbS
that a single Khazar had come to Germany, a blind man, wise and well
learned in Torah.  The kingdom was destroyed gradually over the
centuries until about 1150 the last remnants of the Khazar empire
was in the Crimea.  Khazars built their own tabernacle and did
animal sacrifices.  They brought many rabbis and teachers from Persia
and Byzantium to help them learn Judaism, and it is likely that
lapsed Jews were among the Khazars long before the conversion.
Some contemporaries believed that the Khazars had sheltered
and inter-married with the tribes of Ephraim and Menasseh.
There is no evidence of this.  The earliest German refugees
from the Crusades did report small Khazar communities living
in Poland when they arrived, and some Hungarian  and Byzantine
records do mention them.  Around WWI, a Russian archeological
team excavated a Khazar site, and found at least as many
Christian or Islamic artifacts as Jewish ones, so the likelihood
is that although it was ruled by Jews, the populace had not
been converted on the whole to Judaism.  19th century discoveries
of letters from the Khazar King Joseph are considered not to
be reliable, since there is linguistic evidence of both Byzantine
and Italian Jewish translation errors in them.

If the argument you are having is that Eastern European
Jews do not descend at all from converts, and in particular
from the Khazars, then you probably will lose the argument.
If you are arguing that Judaean heritage is present in Eastern
European Jews, you will win.  Most current historical thinking
makes migration from Germany, Italy, England and France
the primary origin of Polish and Russian Jews.  It is also
true that Khazars are a part of that heritage as are refugees
from Spain and Portugal in the post-1492 era.  Curiously,
relatively little Khazar culture remains, Eastern European
Jews religious practice is strictly mainstream, not displaying
the irregularities described by HIbS and his contemporaries,
and frankly it doesn't help at all in describing why we have
blonde-haired blue-eyed Jews.  The German connection is a much
better explanation of this.  There are also strong etymological
evidences of German dominant migration.  Most compelling is
Yiddish.  Jewish surnames contain many hints of their Central
European origins, as well as Sephardic origins (I won't
get into it again, but Feit and derivatives, Rappoport, Lurie,
Spira are all evidence of this).  There is equally compelling
evidence that Roman Germanic Legionnaires forced bred with
Judaean women, that Roman merchant-class citizens converted
to Judaism in the first 3 centuries C.E., that large numbers
of Berber tribesmen converted to Judaism in North Africa, etc.

There is an excellent discussion of Khazars and HIbS
in Ashtors' "The Jews of Moslem Spain".  Current archeological
work in Kirghizia is also bringing to light the non-convert
Jewish community of Khazaria, as well as the religious freedom
and toleration extended by the Jewish rulers of Khazaria (in
contrast to the Christian and Muslim religious intolerances
of the period).  In the Encyclopedia Judaica there is a reasonable
if out of date article on the Khazars, and the article on Poland
mentions them briefly.  The travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela
has some second-hand accounts of them (11th century) and
the legends of Eldad the Danite preserved in Spain also give
8th century second-hand accounts that largely agree with
HIbS's accounts.  The most likely direct descendants of the
Khazars (i.e. without much intervening mixture of Eastern
European peoples) are the Karaites of Eastern Europe,
mostly in the Crimea but there were small communities in
Poland too.

		Seth Rosenthal

Disclaimer: All opinions are my own not my employers'.



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