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.

Background

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,, citing letters of 10 July 1938 and 24/25 September 1955. Ahearn speculates that [Ezra] Pound may have thought:'If there were no such people as Jews, then the problem of indiscriminate anti-Semitism would disappear. On could focus one’s attention on usurers of whatever description.' Christian Identity,.'The formative period of Christian Identity could roughly be said to be the three decades between 1940 and 1970. Through missionaries like Wesley Swift, Bertrand Comparet and William Potter Gale, it took on a white racialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and far-right conservative political outlook. Combined with the teachings of early disciples Richard G. Butler, Colonel Jack Mohr and James K. Warner, a distinctly racist theology was gradually formed. Whites were said to be the Adamic people, created in His likeness. ... Blacks ... were not the chief target of fear and hatred. This position was reserved for Jews. The latent anti-Semitism found in British-Israelism rose to prominence. Jews were, at best, reduced to mongrelized imposters, not infrequently identified with Eurasian Khazars without any legitimate claim to a closeness with God, and at worst denounced as the offspring of Satan.' 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

References

Category:Jewish people
Category:Jewish history
Category:History of Europe
Category:Racism
Category:Antisemitism
Category:Pseudoscience
Category:Discrimination
Category:Disinformation
Category:Conspiracy theories
Category:Antisemitism in Europe