Khazar myth

**Khazar myth**, also known as the _Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi origin_, is a disproven claim that European Jews mostly or only descended from the Khazars without also descending from the Israelites. There is little or no scientific evidence for this myth, according to decades of peer-reviewed genetic studies.

### Khazars

The Khazars were a confederation of Turkic peoples who set up multiple kingdoms – known as khanates – across Central Asia and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. Some Khazars had a conversion to Judaism. Some people say that it is possible that some of them fled to other parts of Eastern Europe and Central Europe after the fall of the Khazar empire and that they married other kinds of Jews.

### Origin

French scholar Ernest Renan may have created the Khazar myth on January 27, 1883 with his lecture "Judaism as Race and as Religion". In April 1883, the Russian Jewish periodical _Voskhod_ printed a translation of Renan's lecture into the Russian language. But earlier, in 1842, the German Jewish writer Eliakim Carmoly presented the belief that some Jews, some of them being Israelites, had moved from Khazaria to Poland.

Some Jewish writers and teachers wrote suggestions that there may be some amount of Khazar descent in Ashkenazi Jews. In 1884, Sámuel Kohn, a rabbi in Hungary, had the opinion that Hungarian Jews descend from Khazars. In 1885, Isidore Loeb, a historian and rabbi in France, wrote that he agreed with the part of Renan's lecture that claimed that many Jews in Russia and Germany descend from Khazars. In 1904, Bernard Drachman, an Orthodox rabbi in New York City, wrote that he thought that Jews in Russia could have some Khazar descent. Since then, the Jewish scholars Salo Baron, Cecil Roth, Abba Eban, and Zvi Ankori also made suggestions that Ashkenazi Jews may have partial descent from Khazars.

But it has also been promoted in antisemitic ways by fascists, Christian Identity, Neo-Nazis, Arab nationalists, Russian nationalists, and the Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) movement.

In the 1940s, British people who supported the Arab side promoted the Khazar myth among Arabs to try to stop Zionism. At a 1947 UN conference on the Partition Plan for Palestine, Arab nationalist speakers Faris al-Khoury and Jamal Al-Husseini cited the Khazar myth to deny that Jews have a historical connection to Israel and oppose the creation of the modern State of Israel.

## Research

History teacher Israel Bartal wrote that no medieval writings exist that say that Khazar Jews moved to Poland or Lithuania. Linguistics teacher Wolf Moskovich said based on his research it is "very doubtful" that Turkic Khazars were the main ancestors of Eastern European Jews.

The Khazar myth is an unscientific theory. In several papers, Israeli-American scholar Eran Elhaik claimed he had evidence that Ashkenazi Jews have much Khazar ancestry. Several other biologists criticized Elhaik and conducted genetic studies that disproved his claims. In response, Elhaik called the biologists "liars" and "frauds". His papers have given support to anti-Zionists and antisemites who promote the Khazar myth.

Most scientific studies state that Ashkenazi Jews do have a large genetic relationship to Jewish and non-Jewish peoples living in the Middle East. They have only a small degree of relation to peoples living in Central Asia, North Asia, and the North Caucasus — lands where Khazars came from and lived. One such connection is between the Ashkenazi Jewish haplogroup N9a3a1b1 and the Turkic Bashkirs in N9a3a1b.

## Related pages

- Pseudoscience
- Antisemitism in Europe
- Antisemitism in the Soviet Union