What do Palestinian leaders, white supremacists and members of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement have in common? It’s the belief in the so-called “Khazar myth” that unites many antisemites across the ideological spectrum. In June, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh repeated this claim: “There is no connection between the Israelis and the Jews,” he asserted. “Without going into detail – they are the Khazar Jews, who converted to Judaism in the sixth century CE,” Shtayyeh maintained.
Try to make sense of that.
His speech echoed previous statements by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who in 2018 falsely suggested that Eastern European Jews — as opposed to Mizrachi Jews whose roots trace back to Arab countries — are “not Semites, and they have no connection to Semitism or Abraham, Jacob,” as they are supposedly descendants of proselytes from the ‘Khazar Kingdom’.”
Antisemites such as former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the Jersey City shooter and an anchor at Qatar’s Al Jazeera have also disseminated the libel.
By insisting that modern-day Ashkenazi Jews are actually “fake Jews,” they try to disprove the undeniable, thousands-year-old connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. In reality, the theory surrounding the Khazarian conversion to Judaism has been dismissed — even called “junk science” — by most serious scholars.
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The ‘Khazarian hypothesis’ was first popularized among the general public in 1976 by Arthur Koestler, a Jewish author and journalist born in Hungary. His now-debunked book, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, speculated that “the bulk of Eastern [European] Jewry — and hence world Jewry — is of Khazar-Turkish rather than Semitic origin,” implying they are not descendants of Abraham — to whom God promised the Land of Israel according to the Bible.
Khazaria was a multi-ethnic kingdom located in present-day Ukraine and Russia that existed from about the year 650 CE until 969. According to a widely believed tale, the empire’s ruling class at some point adopted Judaism — either in the eighth or ninth century — which preceded widespread conversion among the public.
Fast forward a few hundred years, to the middle of the 13th century. The Mongols defeated Khazaria, resulting in the total collapse of the latter’s empire. That is when Koestler’s theory comes into play: The Khazars, he argued, didn’t just vanish. Instead, they ended up in countries like Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Germany, where they vastly outnumbered the existing Jewish population. His theory inferred that the Khazar population eventually grew to become the majority of world Jewry.
Poorly Researched Khazar Theory Becomes A Tool for Antisemites
From the outset, this poorly researched hypothesis served as a tool for antisemites. The Ku Klux Klan weaponized it as early as 1926, when the white supremacist group decried Jewish immigration to the United States, claiming that Eastern European Jews were “not true Jews, but only Judaized Mongols — Chazars.”
Ironically, Koestler’s book initially aimed to put an end to antisemitism. By insinuating that most modern-day Jews are not related to the biblical nation, he sought to eliminate the racial basis for Jew-hatred. As he wrote in The Thirteenth Tribe:
If so this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur, and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case then the term ‘anti-Semitism’ would become void of meaning, based on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims.”
Evidently, he failed in his mission and antisemites were further emboldened when the Israeli molecular geneticist Eran Elhaik in 2012 published a study that purportedly proved the theory. Elhaik compared the DNA of Jews with that of Armenians and Georgians, which he used as replacements for the ancient Khazarians. “Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Near Eastern-Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries,” the study concluded.
However, both Koestler’s and Elhaik’s research was quickly refuted by countless others, with some experts even referring to proponents of the theory as “outlier folks… who have a minority view that’s not supported scientifically.” Others have called the Khazarian hypothesis “junk science.”
Indeed, the Khazarian hypothesis has been debunked by virtually every field of science. For instance, historians stress that the kingdom most likely never converted to Judaism. Archaeologists excavating in the former Khazar lands have found almost no artifacts displaying Jewish symbols. Moreover, linguists point out that Yiddish — for centuries the language spoken by Eastern European Jews — is in no way similar to the vernacular used in Khazaria, nor do Jewish surnames from the last 600 years contain any link to the kingdom.
Experts in Jewish genetics have lambasted Elhaik’s “findings,” arguing that 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 fact, most DNA research proves precisely the opposite: namely, that European Jews are closely related to Middle Eastern populations.
Related Reading: The Jewish Connection to the Land of Israel
Most of this research has long been readily available, with leading scholars having refuted Elhaik’s paper within a year of its publication. Nevertheless, Jew-haters and anti-Zionists alike continue to use the Khazarian myth to deny the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the Land of Israel.
Interestingly, Elhaik — who served in the Israeli army for seven years — has said that it bothers him that individuals utilize his research for nefarious purposes. For his part, Koestler stated that the “problem of the Khazar infusion a thousand years ago… is irrelevant to modern Israel,” as the Jewish state’s existence is, in his view, predicated on decisions made by the international community.
The anti-Zionist argument is flawed for another major reason: that is, most Jewish Israelis are not of European descent. According to Tel Aviv University research, in 2018 only 31.8 percent of Israeli Jews self-identified as Ashkenazi (Eastern European). A significantly larger share, about 45 percent, identified as Mizrahi – an umbrella term for those Jews that fled Arab countries to nascent Israel. Israelis of Yemeni origin, for example, trace their roots in the region back to biblical times.
The fact that millions of Israeli Mizrahim are indigenous to the Middle East is indisputable.
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