The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, often called the Khazar myth by its critics, is a largely abandoned historical hypothesis that postulated that

Ashkenazi Jews Ashkenazi Jews ( ; also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim) form a distinct subgroup of the Jewish diaspora, that emerged in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium CE. They traditionally speak Yiddish, a language ...

were primarily, or to a large extent, descended from

converts to Judaism Gerim (Hebrew plural: גרים "converts", singular masculine: גר "ger", singular feminine: גייורת "giyoret") also known as gerey tzedek (גְּיֵירֵי צֶדֶק righteous proselytes) are non-Jews who have converted to Judaism and ...

among the

Khazars The Khazars ; 突厥可薩 ''Tūjué Kěsà'', () were a nomadic Turkic people who, in the late 6th century CE, established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, a ...

, a multi-ethnic conglomerate of mostly

Turkic peoples Turkic peoples are a collection of diverse ethnic groups of West Asia, West, Central Asia, Central, East Asia, East, and North Asia as well as parts of Europe, who speak Turkic languages.. "Turkic peoples, any of various peoples whose members ...

who formed a semi-nomadic

khanate A khanate ( ) or khaganate refers to historic polity, polities ruled by a Khan (title), khan, khagan, khatun, or khanum. Khanates were typically nomadic Mongol and Turkic peoples, Turkic or Tatars, Tatar societies located on the Eurasian Steppe, ...

in and around the northern and central

Caucasus The Caucasus () or Caucasia (), is a region spanning Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is situated between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, comprising parts of Southern Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The Caucasus Mountains, i ...

and the

Pontic–Caspian steppe The Pontic–Caspian Steppe is a steppe extending across Eastern Europe to Central Asia, formed by the Caspian and Pontic steppes. It stretches from the northern shores of the Black Sea (the ''Pontus Euxinus'' of antiquity) to the northern a ...

in the late 6th century CE. The hypothesis draws on

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the West ...

sources such as the

Khazar Correspondence The Khazar Correspondence is a set of documents, which are alleged to date from the 950s or 960s, and to be letters between Hasdai ibn Shaprut, foreign secretary to the Caliph of Cordoba, and Joseph Khagan of the Khazars. The correspondence is ...

, according to which at some point in the 8th–9th centuries, a small number of Khazars were said by

Judah Halevi Judah haLevi (also Yehuda Halevi or ha-Levi; ; ; c. 1075 – 1141) was a Sephardic Jewish poet, physician and philosopher. Halevi is considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets and is celebrated for his secular and religious poems, many of whic ...

and

Abraham ibn Daud Abraham ibn Daud (; ) was a Spanish-Jewish astronomer, historian and philosopher; born in Córdoba, Spain about 1110; who was said to have been killed for his religious beliefs in Toledo, Spain, about 1180. He is sometimes known by the abbrevia ...

to have converted to

Rabbinic Judaism Rabbinic Judaism (), also called Rabbinism, Rabbinicism, Rabbanite Judaism, or Talmudic Judaism, is rooted in the many forms of Judaism that coexisted and together formed Second Temple Judaism in the land of Israel, giving birth to classical rabb ...

. The hypothesis also postulates that after collapse of the Khazar empire, the Khazars fled to

Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is a subregion of the Europe, European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic connotations. Its eastern boundary is marked by the Ural Mountain ...

and made up a large part of the Jews there. The scope of the

conversion Conversion or convert may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''The Convert'', a 2023 film produced by Jump Film & Television and Brouhaha Entertainment * "Conversion" (''Doctor Who'' audio), an episode of the audio drama ''Cyberman'' * ...

within the

Khazar Khanate The Khazars ; 突厥可薩 ''Tūjué Kěsà'', () were a nomadic Turkic people who, in the late 6th century CE, established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, and ...

remains uncertain, but the evidence used to tie the subsequent Ashkenazi communities to the Khazars is meager and subject to conflicting interpretations. Speculation that Europe's Jewish population originated among the Khazars has persisted for two centuries, from at least as early as 1808. In the late 19th century,

Ernest Renan Joseph Ernest Renan (; ; 27 February 18232 October 1892) was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, writing on Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and critic. He wrote wo ...

and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe originated among refugees who had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into Europe. Though intermittently evoked by several scholars since that time, the Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of

Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler (, ; ; ; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was an Austria-Hungary, Austro-Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest, and was educated in Austria, apart from his early school years. In 1931, Koestler j ...

's ''

The Thirteenth Tribe ''The Thirteenth Tribe'' is a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler advocating the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Judeans and Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Tur ...

'' in 1976. It has been revived recently by geneticist

Eran Elhaik Eran Elhaik (; born 1980) is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins owned b ...

, who in 2013 conducted a study aiming to vindicate it.

Genetic studies on Jews Genetic studies of Jews are part of the population genetics discipline and are used to analyze the ancestry of Jewish populations, complementing research in other fields such as history, linguistics, archaeology, and paleontology. These studies ...

have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews. Geneticists such as Doron Behar and others (2013) have concluded that such a link is unlikely, noting that it is difficult to test the Khazar hypothesis using genetics because there is lack of clear modern descendants of the Khazars that could provide a clear test of the contribution to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, but found no genetic markers in Ashkenazi Jews that would link them to peoples of the Caucasus/Khazar area. Atzmon and others found evidence that the Ashkenazi have mixed

Near East The Near East () is a transcontinental region around the Eastern Mediterranean encompassing the historical Fertile Crescent, the Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and coastal areas of the Arabian Peninsula. The term was invented in the 20th ...

ern and Southern European/Mediterranean origins, though some admixture with Khazar and Slavic populations after 100 CE was not excluded. Xue and others note a wholly Khazar/Turkish/Middle eastern origin is out of the question, given the complexity of Ashkenazi admixtures. Although the majority of contemporary geneticists who have published on the topic dismiss it, there are some who have defended its plausibility, or not excluded the possibility of some Khazar component in the formation of the Ashkenazi. The Khazar hypothesis is sometimes cited in

antisemitic Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...

arguments promoted by adherents of various movements and ideologies to express the belief that modern Jews are not true descendants of the

Israelites Israelites were a Hebrew language, Hebrew-speaking ethnoreligious group, consisting of tribes that lived in Canaan during the Iron Age. Modern scholarship describes the Israelites as emerging from indigenous Canaanites, Canaanite populations ...

. For example, some

anti-Zionists Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palesti ...

may cite the Khazar hypothesis in an attempt to discredit the claim by modern Jews to the

land of Israel The Land of Israel () is the traditional Jewish name for an area of the Southern Levant. Related biblical, religious and historical English terms include the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Holy Land, and Palestine. The definition ...

History

1806–1918

Lawrence J. Epstein Lawrence Jeffrey Epstein (born 1946) is an American author who writes and lectures about American culture and society, Jewish life, and mystery fiction. He is best known for his book ''The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America'' a ...

attributes to the Ukrainian Rabbi

Isaac Baer Levinsohn Isaac Baer Levinsohn (; October 13, 1788 – February 13, 1860), also known as the Ribal (), was a Jewish scholar of Hebrew, a satirist, a writer and Haskalah leader. He has been called "the Moses Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn of Russia." In his ''Be ...

(1788–1860) the first reference of a connection between the Ashkenazi Jews and the Khazars. According to

Jacob S. Raisin Jacob Salmon Raisin (October 19, 1878 – January 11, 1946) was a Belarusian-born Jewish-American who served as rabbi in Charleston, South Carolina for nearly 30 years. Life Raisin was born on October 19, 1878, in Nesvizh, Russia, the son of Rab ...

, Levinsohn expressed the opinion that Russian Jews hailed from the banks of the

Volga The Volga (, ) is the longest river in Europe and the longest endorheic basin river in the world. Situated in Russia, it flows through Central Russia to Southern Russia and into the Caspian Sea. The Volga has a length of , and a catchment ...

. Levinsohn wrote in 1828:

'Our elders told us that some generations earlier the Jews in these parts spoke only this Russian language, and this Ashkenazi Jewish language we speak now had not yet spread among all the Jews living in these regions.'

The hypothesis was advanced nonetheless earlier, in 1808, by Johann Ewers in his ''Vom Ursprung des russischen Staats'' ("On the origins of the Russian state") in the context of an early controversy over the foundations of the Russian state, which pitted scholars espousing a Norman origin for the

Varangians The Varangians ( ; ; ; , or )Varangian
," Online Etymology Dictionary were

Kievan Rus' Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus,. * was the first East Slavs, East Slavic state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical At ...

were Slavic and indigenous. Ewers proposed the idea that the Viking/Varangian founders were in fact Khazars. The Russian historian

Nikolay Karamzin Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin () was a Russian historian, writer, poet and critic. He is best remembered for his fundamental ''History of the Russian State'', a 12-volume national history. Early life Karamzin was born in the small village of ...

advanced the claim, asserting that considerable numbers of Khazars had left Khazaria for Kievan Rus' in the time of

Vladimir I Vladimir I may refer to: * Vladimir the Great Vladimir I Sviatoslavich or Volodymyr I Sviatoslavych (; Christian name: ''Basil''; 15 July 1015), given the epithet "the Great", was Prince of Novgorod from 970 and Grand Prince of Kiev from 97 ...

(980–1015). The German Orientalist Karl Neumann suggested as early as 1847 that the migration of Khazars might have contributed to the formation of the core population of the Jews of Eastern Europe, without however specifying whether he was referring to Judaizing Turks or ethnic Jewish residents of Khazaria. Subsequently, Abraham Eliyahu Harkavi suggested in 1869 that there might be a link between the Khazars and European Jews. Three years later, however, in 1872, a Crimean Karaite,

Abraham Firkovich Abraham (Avraham) ben Samuel Firkovich (Hebrew - ''Avraham ben Shmuel''; Karayce: Аврагъам Фиркович - ''Avragham Firkovich'') (Sept. 27, 1786–June 7, 1874) was a famous Karaite writer and archaeologist, collector of ancient ...

, alternatively proclaimed that the members of his Turkic-speaking sect were descended from Turkic converts to Judaism. This hypothesis, that the descendants of Khazar converts to Judaism formed a major proportion of

Ashkenazim Ashkenazi Jews ( ; also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim) form a distinct subgroup of the Jewish diaspora, that emerged in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium CE. They traditionally speak Yiddish, a language ...

, was first proposed to a Western public by

in 1883. In a lecture delivered in Paris before the ''Cercle du Saint-Simon'' on 27 January 1883, Renan argued that conversion played a significant role in the formation of the Jewish people, stating that:

This conversion of the kingdom of the Khazars has a considerable importance regarding the origin of those Jews who dwell in the countries along the Danube and southern Russia. These regions enclose great masses of Jewish populations which have in all probability nothing or almost nothing that is anthropologically Jewish in them.

According to Mari Réthelyi, a Jewish studies teacher writing in the journal ''Hungarian Cultural Studies'', many Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth century, responding to

Magyarization Magyarization ( , also Hungarianization; ), after "Magyar"—the Hungarian autonym—was an assimilation or acculturation process by which non-Hungarian nationals living in the Kingdom of Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, adop ...

and to Hungarian antisemitism, took up the theory, proposed by Rabbi

Samuel Kohn Samuel Kohn (1841–1920) was a Hungarian rabbi in Budapest from 1866 to 1905, time he was the Chief Rabbi of Budapest. He is remembered today as the author of ''A szombatosok, történetök, dogmatikájok és irodalmok'' ("The Sabbatarians: a com ...

in 1884, that Hungarian Jews, like Hungarian Christians, shared a common ethnic descent from the intermarriage of Khazars and Magyars. Renan's thesis found an echo soon after, in 1885, when

Isidore Loeb Isidore Loeb (1 November 1839 – 3 June 1892) was a French scholar born in Soultzmatt, Haut-Rhin. The son of Rabbi Seligmann Loeb of Sulzmatt, he was educated in Bible and Talmud by his father. After having followed the usual course in the publ ...

, a rabbi, historian and secretary of the

Alliance Israélite Universelle The Alliance israélite universelle (AIU; ; ) is a Paris-based international Jewish organization founded in 1860 with the purpose of safeguarding human rights for Jews around the world. It promotes the ideals of Jewish self-defense and self-suffi ...

, arguing for the cause of

Jewish emancipation Jewish emancipation was the process in various nations in Europe of eliminating Jewish disabilities, to which European Jews were then subject, and the recognition of Jews as entitled to equality and citizenship rights. It included efforts withi ...

, challenged the notion that nations were based on races, and the Jews therefore, could be excluded as alien. To the contrary, he argued, they were no different from other peoples and nations, all of which arose from miscegenation: the Jews were no exception, and one could assume, he added, that many German and Russian Jews descended from the Khazars. Similarly, in 1893,

Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu Henri Jean Baptiste Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (; February 12, 1842 – June 16, 1912) was a French publicist and historian born at Lisieux, Calvados (department), Calvados. He specialized in writing about the history of Russia. Biography In 186 ...

, a critic of antisemitism who drew on Renan, queried whether or not thousands of

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Polish people, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken * Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin ...

and

Russian Jews The history of the Jews in Russia and areas historically connected with it goes back at least 1,500 years. Jews in Russia have historically constituted a large religious and ethnic diaspora; the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest po ...

might have their origins traced back to the "old nomads of the steppes." Other scholars, such as

Joseph Jacobs Joseph Jacobs (29 August 1854 – 30 January 1916) was an Australian-born folklorist, literary critic and historian who became a notable collector and publisher of English folklore. Born in Sydney to a Jewish family, his work went on to popula ...

(1886), expressed scepticism. The Russian-Jewish physician and physical anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg (1867–1928), using physical measurements of 1,350 Jews in his home town of

Elizavetgrad Kropyvnytskyi (, ) is a city in central Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east ...

, challenged the idea that east European Jews originated, like German Jews, as migrants from medieval France. Jewish settlement in eastern Europe took place very early, and these rooted eastern communities readily accepted into their midst Khazars who had converted, absorbing many thousands into the Kievan empire. The theory implied Jewish culture predated the rise of Russia, an implication which led Stalin decades later to ban Khazar studies in the Soviet Union.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (11 May 1752 – 22 January 1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has be ...

(1752-1840), a pioneer of race science and physical anthropology, had argued earlier that the origins of the "European" race lay in the Caucasus. In this context, Weissenberg's formulation, in identifying Eastern Jews as descendants of an intermixture of Jews with the Caucasian Khazars, presented the eastern Jews, long thought inferior or less noble than Western Sephardic Jews, as the authentic, veritable heirs of a European Jewish tradition. In 1903, Maksymilian Ernest Gumplowicz (1864–1897), in his posthumous treatise entitled ''The beginnings of Jewish religion in Poland'' examined traces of Khazar elements in early Polish history. In 1909 Hugo von Kutschera developed the notion into a book-length study, arguing that Khazars formed the foundational core of the modern Ashkenazi.

Maurice Fishberg Maurice Fishberg (August 16, 1872 – August 30, 1934) was a Jewish-American physical anthropologist who specialised in the ethnology of the Jews. Fishberg was born in Kamenetz Podolsky (now Ukraine) and died in New York City New York, oft ...

introduced the notion to an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

audience in 1911 in his book, ''The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment''. When at the

Versailles Peace Conference The Palace of Versailles ( ; ) is a former royal residence commissioned by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about west of Paris, in the Yvelines Department of Île-de-France region in France. The palace is owned by the government of F ...

, a Jewish

Zionist Zionism is an Ethnic nationalism, ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in History of Europe#From revolution to imperialism (1789–1914), Europe in the late 19th century that aimed to establish and maintain a national home for the ...

called

Palestine Palestine, officially the State of Palestine, is a country in West Asia. Recognized by International recognition of Palestine, 147 of the UN's 193 member states, it encompasses the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and th ...

the land of the Jewish people's ancestors,

Joseph Reinach Joseph Reinach (30 September 1856 – 18 April 1921) was a French author and politician. Biography He was born in Paris. His two brothers Salomon Reinach and Théodore Reinach would later be known in the field of archaeology. After studying at L ...

, a

French Jewish The history of the Jews in France deals with Jews and Jewish communities in France since at least the Early Middle Ages. France was a centre of Jewish learning in the Middle Ages, but Persecution of Jews, persecution increased over time, includ ...

member of parliament who was opposed to Zionism, dismissed the idea, arguing that Jews descended from Israelites were a tiny minority. In his view, conversion had played a major role in the expansion of the Jewish people, and, in addition, he claimed, the majority of "Russian, Polish and

Galician Jews Galician Jews or Galitzianers () are members of the subgroup of Ashkenazim, Ashkenazi Jews originating and developed in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and Bukovina from contemporary western Ukraine (Lviv Oblast, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblas ...

descend from the Khazars, a Tatar people from the south of Russia who converted to Judaism en masse at the time of

Charlemagne Charlemagne ( ; 2 April 748 – 28 January 814) was List of Frankish kings, King of the Franks from 768, List of kings of the Lombards, King of the Lombards from 774, and Holy Roman Emperor, Emperor of what is now known as the Carolingian ...

Interwar years, 1918–1939

The idea was also taken up by the Polish-Jewish economic historian and

General Zionist The General Zionists () were a centrist Zionist movement and a political party in Israel. The General Zionists supported the leadership of Chaim Weizmann and their views were largely colored by central European culture. The party was considered ...

Yitzhak Schipper in 1918, by the Harvard anthropologist Roland B. Dixon (1923) and writer

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, hist ...

(1921), who used it to argue that "The main part of Jewry never was in Judea", a thesis that was to have a political echo in later opinion. In 1931

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...

wrote to

Max Eitingon Max Eitingon (; 26 June 1881 – 30 July 1943) was a German medical doctor and psychoanalyst, instrumental in establishing the institutional parameters of psychoanalytic education and training.Sidney L. Pomer, 'Max Eitingon (1881–1943): The Org ...

that the sculptor

Oscar Nemon Oscar Nemon (born Oscar Neumann; 13 March 1906 – 13 April 1985) was a Croatian sculptor who was born in Osijek, Croatia, but eventually settled in England. He is best known for his series of more than a dozen public statues of Winston Churchill ...

, for whom he was sitting, showed the lineaments of a "Slavic Eastern Jew, Khazar or

Kalmuck Kalmyks (), archaically anglicised as Calmucks (), are the only Mongolic ethnic group living in Europe, residing in the easternmost part of the European Plain. This dry steppe area, west of the lower Volga River, known among the nomads as I ...

or something like that". In 1932,

Samuel Krauss Samuel Krauss ( Ukk, 18 February 1866 - Cambridge, 4 June 1948) was professor at the Jewish Teachers' Seminary, Budapest, 1894–1906, and at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Vienna, 1906–1938. He moved to England as a refugee and spent his last ...

ventured the theory that the biblical

Ashkenaz Ashkenaz ( ''ʾAškənāz'') in the Hebrew Bible is one of the descendants of Noah. Ashkenaz is the first son of Gomer, and a Japhetic patriarch in the Table of Nations. In rabbinic literature, the descendants of Ashkenaz were first associated ...

referred to northern

Asia Minor Anatolia (), also known as Asia Minor, is a peninsula in West Asia that makes up the majority of the land area of Turkey. It is the westernmost protrusion of Asia and is geographically bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean ...

, and he identified it with the Khazars, a position immediately disputed by Jacob Mann. This interwar period consolidated also a belief, originally developed by the Russian Orientalists V.V. Grigor’iev and V.D. Smirnov, that the East European congregations of the Karaite sect of Judaism were descendants of Turkic Khazars. The idea of a Khazarian origin of the Karaites was then adopted as their official viewpoint. Seraja Szapszal (1873–1961), from 1927, the

ḥakham ''Hakham'' (or ''Chakam(i), Haham(i), Hacham(i), Hach''; ) is a term in Judaism meaning a wise or skillful man; it often refers to someone who is a great Torah scholar. It can also refer to any cultured and learned person: "He who says a wise th ...

of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaite community had begun to implement a thorough-going reform policy of dejudaizing Karaite culture and traditions and transforming along Turkic lines. As a secular Jew and orientalist he was influenced by

Atatürk's reforms Atatürk's reforms ( or ''Atatürk Devrimleri''), also referred to as the Turkish Revolution (Turkish language, Turkish: ''Türk Devrimi''), were a series of political, legal, religious, cultural, social, and economic policy changes, designed ...

, and his policy was dictated by several considerations: Jews were suffering from harassment in public and private in Eastern Europe; he wished to forestall the threat he had intuited was imminent in both Fascism and Nazism, which were beginning to gain a foothold; he was passionate about the Karaites' language, Karaim, and its Turkish tradition, and somewhat insouciant of the Judaic heritage of his people. In 1934

Corrado Gini Corrado Gini (23 May 1884 – 13 March 1965) was an Italian statistician, demographer and sociologist who developed the Gini coefficient, a measure of the income inequality in a society. Gini was a proponent of organicism and applied it to nat ...

, a distinguished statistician, interested also in demography and anthropology, with close ties to the fascist elite, led an expedition in August–October 1934 to survey the Karaites. He concluded that Karaites were ethnically mixed, predominantly Chuvash which he mistook to be

Finno-Ugric Finno-Ugric () is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic languages, Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in ...

descendants of the Tauro-Cimmerians who at one point had been absorbed into the Khazars who for Gini however were not Turkic. A further conclusion was that the Ashkenazi arose from ‘Turko-Tatar converts to Judaism.’ Kizilov, Mikhail (2009)
''The Karaites of Galicia: An Ethnoreligious Minority Among the Ashkenazim, the Turks, and the Slavs, 1772-1945''
BRILL, pp. 266, 269-271, 277ff., 282, 335. Though the Khazar-Karaite theory is unsubstantiated by any historical evidence, - the early Karaite literature speaks of Khazars as

mamzer In the Hebrew Bible and Jewish religious law, a ''mamzer'' (, , "estranged person"; plural ''mamzerim'') is a person who is born as the result of certain forbidden relationships or incest (as it is defined by the Bible), or the descendant of s ...

im, 'bastards' or 'strangers' within Judaism - this myth served a political purpose, of taking that community out of the stranglehold of antisemitic regulations and prejudices directed generally against Jews in Eastern Europe.

1939–1945

In 1943, Abraham N. Polak (sometimes referred to as ''Poliak''), later professor of the history of the Middle Ages at

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) is a Public university, public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Located in northwest Tel Aviv, the university is the center of teaching and ...

, published a

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

monograph A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

in which he concluded that the East European Jews came from Khazaria. First written as an article in 1941, then as a monograph (1943), it was twice revised in 1944, and then in 1951 with the title ''Khazaria: History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe.'' In Nazi Germany, unlike most race theorists in Germany down to his time, Hans F. K. Günther argued that the Jews were not a pure race, although he nevertheless considered them to be highly inbred. He argued that the Ashkenazi were a mix of Near Eastern, Oriental, East Baltic, Eastern, Inner-Asian, Nordic, Hamite, and Negro peoples and separate from the Sephardim. Günther believed that the conversion of the Khazars, whom he took to have been a Near Eastern race, constituted a further external element in the racial makeup of the Ashkenazi Jews, strengthening its Near Eastern component. Günther's theorizing about racial consequences flowing from the conversion of the Khazars was embraced by

Gerhard Kittel Gerhard Kittel (23 September 1888 – 11 July 1948) was a German Lutheran theologian and lexicographer of biblical languages. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis and an open antisemite. He is known in the field of biblical studies for hi ...

. The Karaite claim not to be ethnic Jews, but descendants of the Khazars, was eventually accepted by the Nazis who exempted them, unlike the Crimean

Krymchaks Krymchaks ( Krymchak: , , , ) are Jewish ethno-religious communities of Crimea derived from Turkic-speaking adherents of Rabbinic Judaism.UN plan in 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the British politicians

John Hope Simpson Sir John Hope Simpson OBJ (23 July 1868 – 10 April 1961) was a British Liberal politician who served as a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom and later in the Government of the Dominion of Newfoundland. Hope Simpson was born in ...

and

Edward Spears Major-General Sir Edward Louis Spears, 1st Baronet, (7 August 1886 – 27 January 1974) was a British Army officer and politician. He served as a liaison officer between British and French forces during both World Wars. From 1917 to 1920, he ...

, intent on denying Zionism that part of its claim that drew on biblical arguments, asserted that Jewish immigrants to

Mandatory Palestine Mandatory Palestine was a British Empire, British geopolitical entity that existed between 1920 and 1948 in the Palestine (region), region of Palestine, and after 1922, under the terms of the League of Nations's Mandate for Palestine. After ...

were the descendants of pagan converts and not of the Israelites. The approach was one shared by both gentile and Jewish anti-Zionists. Rory Miller claims that their denial of lineal descent from Israelites drew on the Khazar theory. In anti-Zionist argumentation delivered at the UN in 1947 Faris al-Khoury and Jamal Al-Husseini used the theory to oppose the creation of a Jewish state on racial and historic grounds. Cecil Hourani claimed that the Arab leaders had been convinced of the value of the argument by

Benjamin H. Freedman Benjamin Harrison Freedman (October 4, 1890 – May 1984) was an American businessman, Holocaust denier, and vocal anti-Zionist. Born in a Jewish family, he converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Outside of political activism, Freedman ...

. Internal British documents seem to support the claim. It would later play a role in

Arab Arabs (, , ; , , ) are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in West Asia and North Africa. A significant Arab diaspora is present in various parts of the world. Arabs have been in the Fertile Crescent for thousands of years ...

anti-Zionist Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the Palestine (region) ...

polemics, taking on an antisemitic edge, though Bernard Lewis, noted in 1987 that serious Arab scholars had dropped it, remarked that it only occasionally emerged in Arab political polemics.

1950–1976

D.M. Dunlop, writing in 1954, thought very little evidence backed what he regarded as a mere assumption, and argued that the Ashkenazi-Khazar descent hypothesis went far beyond what "our imperfect records" permit.

Léon Poliakov Léon Poliakov (; 25 November 1910 – 8 December 1997) was a French historian who wrote extensively on the Holocaust and antisemitism. He is the author of ''The Aryan Myth''. Biography Born into a Russian Jewish family, Poliakov lived in Italy ...

, while assuming the Jews of Western Europe resulted from a "panmixia" in the first millennium, on the basis of

serology Serology is the scientific study of Serum (blood), serum and other body fluids. In practice, the term usually refers to the medical diagnosis, diagnostic identification of Antibody, antibodies in the serum. Such antibodies are typically formed in r ...

research showing their blood types overlapped with those of other European populations, asserted in 1955 that it was widely assumed that Europe's Eastern Jews descended from a mixture of Khazarian and

German Jews The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321 CE, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish commu ...

Polak Polak is the Polish language, Polish noun for a Polish people, Pole (also in several other Slavic languages). It is also a surname. In 2020 there were over 21,500 persons with the surname in Poland. Notable people with the surname include * A. ...

's work found some support from

Salo Wittmayer Baron Salo Wittmayer Baron (May 26, 1895 – November 25, 1989) was an Austrian-born American historian, described as "the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century". Baron taught at Columbia University from 1930 until his retirement in 1963. Lif ...

and

Ben-Zion Dinur Ben-Zion Dinur (; January 1884 – 8 July 1973) was a Ukrainian-born Israeli historian, educator, and politician. He held the position of professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and represented Mapai in the first ...

, but was dismissed by Bernard Weinryb as a fiction (1962). In 1957

, called by his biographer an "architect of Jewish history", devoted a large part of a chapter in his ''Social and Religious History of the Jews'' to the Khazarian Jewish state, and the impact he believed that community exercised on the formation of East European Jewries in his ''Social and Religious History of the Jews'' (1957). The scarcity of direct Jewish testimonies did not disconcert Baron: this was to be expected since medieval Jews were "generally inarticulate outside their main centers of learning". The Khazarian turn to Judaism was, he judged, the "largest and last mass conversion", involving both the royal house and large sectors of the population. Jews migrated there to flee the recurrent intolerance against Jews and the geopolitical upheavals of the region's chronic wars, which often proved devastating to northern

, between

Byzantium Byzantium () or Byzantion () was an ancient Greek city in classical antiquity that became known as Constantinople in late antiquity and Istanbul today. The Greek name ''Byzantion'' and its Latinization ''Byzantium'' continued to be used as a n ...

Sassanid Persia The Sasanian Empire (), officially Eranshahr ( , "Empire of the Iranian peoples, Iranians"), was an List of monarchs of Iran, Iranian empire that was founded and ruled by the House of Sasan from 224 to 651. Enduring for over four centuries, th ...

, and the

Abbasid The Abbasid Caliphate or Abbasid Empire (; ) was the third caliphate to succeed the prophets and messengers in Islam, Islamic prophet Muhammad. It was founded by a dynasty descended from Muhammad's uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib (566–653 C ...

and

Umayyad Caliphate The Umayyad Caliphate or Umayyad Empire (, ; ) was the second caliphate established after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and was ruled by the Umayyad dynasty. Uthman ibn Affan, the third of the Rashidun caliphs, was also a member o ...

s. For Baron, the fact of Jewish Khazaria played a lively role in stirring up among Western Jews an image of "

red Jews The Red Jews (), a legendary Jewish nation, appear in vernacular sources in Germany during the medieval era, from the 13th to the 15th centuries. These texts portray the Red Jews as an epochal threat to Christendom, one which would invade Europ ...

", and among Jews in

Islamic countries The terms Islamic world and Muslim world commonly refer to the Islamic community, which is also known as the Ummah. This consists of all those who adhere to the religious beliefs, politics, and laws of Islam or to societies in which Islam is p ...

a beacon of hope. After the dissolution of Khazaria, Baron sees a diaspora drifting both north into Russia, Poland and

Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...

, and westwards into

Pannonia Pannonia (, ) was a Roman province, province of the Roman Empire bounded on the north and east by the Danube, on the west by Noricum and upper Roman Italy, Italy, and on the southward by Dalmatia (Roman province), Dalmatia and upper Moesia. It ...

and the

Balkans The Balkans ( , ), corresponding partially with the Balkan Peninsula, is a geographical area in southeastern Europe with various geographical and historical definitions. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch throug ...

, where their cultivated presence both established Jewish communities and paved the way, ironically, for the Slavonic conversion to

Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion, which states that Jesus in Christianity, Jesus is the Son of God (Christianity), Son of God and Resurrection of Jesus, rose from the dead after his Crucifixion of Jesus, crucifixion, whose ...

. By the 11th and 12th centuries, these Eastern Jews make their first appearance in the Jewish literature of France and Germany.

Maimonides Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (, ) and also referred to by the Hebrew acronym Rambam (), was a Sephardic rabbi and Jewish philosophy, philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah schola ...

, bemoaning the neglect of learning in the East, laid his hopes for the perpetuation of Jewish learning in the young struggling communities of Europe but would, Baron concludes, have been surprised to find that within centuries precisely in Eastern Europe would arise thriving communities that were to assume leadership of the Jewish people itself.

1976–present: Koestler, ''The Thirteenth Tribe'' and contemporary views

The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the 1976 publication of

's ''

'', which made sweeping claims for a Khazar legacy among the Ashkenazi, including the argument that the Jews could not have reached 8 million in

without the contribution of the Khazars. His book was both positively and negatively reviewed. Israel's ambassador to Britain branded it "an anti-Semitic action financed by the Palestinians", while

Bernard Lewis Bernard Lewis, (31 May 1916 – 19 May 2018) was a British-American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near ...

claimed that the idea was not supported by any evidence whatsoever, and had been "abandoned by all serious scholars". Raphael Patai, however, registered some support for the idea that Khazar remnants had played a role in the growth of Eastern European Jewish communities, and several amateur researchers, such as Boris Altschüler (1994) and Kevin Alan Brook, kept the thesis in the public eye. Brook's views evolved as new data became available: in the first edition of his book (1999), he contended that about one-fourth of Ashkenazic ancestry may trace back to the Khazars, whereas in the second edition (2006) he regarded the Khazar contribution as "small" and in the third edition (2018) he argued against any Khazar contribution. Koestler argued that the Khazar theory would mitigate European racially based antisemitism.: "Every prayer and ritual observance proclaims membership of an ancient race, which automatically separates the Jew from the racial and historic past of the people in whose midst he lives. It sets the Jew apart and invites his being set apart. It automatically creates physical and cultural ghettoes." In 2007, Peter Golden suggested that at least some of the Ashkenazi Jews of Hungary in particular (along with some Hungarians) might have inherited a minority of their ancestry from Khazar remnants that migrated west. The theory has been used to counter the concept of Jewish nationhood. It has been revived recently in a variety of approaches, from linguistics ( Paul Wexler) to historiography (

Shlomo Sand Shlomo Sand (pronounced ''Zand''; ; born 10 September 1946) is an Austrian-born Israeli post-Zionist historian and socialist. He has served as an emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University since 2014.

) and

population genetics Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as Adaptation (biology), adaptation, s ...

(Eran Elhaik).. In broad academic perspective, both the idea that the Khazars converted ''en masse'' to Judaism, and the suggestion that they emigrated to form the core population of Ashkenazi Jewry, remain highly polemical issues. Writing in 2011,

Simon Schama Sir Simon Michael Schama ( ; born 13 February 1945) is an English historian and television presenter. He specialises in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and French history. He is a professor of history and art history at Columbia Uni ...

in his ''The Story of the Jews,'' endorsed the traditional narrative of a Khazar conversion under kings of distant Jewish descent who initiated judaising reforms among the population. In June 2014,

Shaul Stampfer Shaul Stampfer (; born 1948) is a researcher of East European Jewry specializing in Lithuanian yeshivas, Jewish demography, migration and education. Biography Shaul Stampfer was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to a Jewish family, and is a descendant o ...

published a paper challenging the Khazar hypothesis as ungrounded in sources contemporary with the Khazar period, stating: "Such a conversion, even though it’s a wonderful story, never happened".

Genetics and the Khazar theory

Before modern DNA population genetics entered the field, Raphael Patai described the Khazars in racial terms as being a Turkic people with some

Mongoloid Mongoloid () is an obsolete racial grouping of various peoples indigenous to large parts of Asia, the Americas, and some regions in Europe and Oceania. The term is derived from a now-disproven theory of biological race. In the past, other terms ...

admixture. After major advances in DNA

sequence analysis In bioinformatics, sequence analysis is the process of subjecting a DNA, RNA or peptide sequence to any of a wide range of analytical methods to understand its features, function, structure, or evolution. It can be performed on the entire genome ...

and computing technology in the late 20th and early 21st century, a plethora of

genetic research Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar workin ...

on Jewish and other human populations has been conducted worldwide. Summing up the results in 2015, the Yiddish scholar

Alexander Beider Alexander Borisovich Beider (, ; , ) is the author of reference books in the field of Jewish onomastics and the linguistic history of Yiddish. Biography Alexander Beider was born in Moscow in 1963. In 1986 he graduated from the Moscow Institute ...

stated that genetic studies often resulted in contradictory outcomes, complicated at times by the political or religious views of some researchers. In 2000, science journalist

Nicholas Wade Nicholas Michael Landon Wade (born 17 May 1942) is a British author and journalist. He is the author of numerous books, and has served as staff writer and editor for ''Nature'', ''Science'', and the science section of ''The New York Times''. ...

interpreted a genetics paper on Ashkenazi Y-chromosome lineages as refuting theories that the Ashkenazi were descendants of converts generally or of the Khazars specifically. The following year, in 2001, Almut Nebel et al., summarizing studies that reported a low-level European gene flow contributing to Ashkenazi paternal gene pool, suggested this influence might be reflected in the Eu 19 chromosomes common in Eastern Europe, or otherwise, that Ashkenazim with this component might descend from Khazars, an hypothesis the authors found "attractive". In 2008, in a book entitled ''Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History '', David Goldstein stated that despite his initial skepticism regarding Koestler's thesis, the certainty underlying his dismissal had been undermined when he considered that a hypothetical Khazar connection struck him as no more far-fetched than what had emerged in genetics concerning the apparent 'spectacular continuity of the Cohen line' or the discovery of what seemed to be Jewish genetic signatures among the Bantu Lemba. In his view, the idea had a degree of plausibility, if not likely. In 2013 Martin B. Richards stated that presently available genetic studies shows that 50-80 percent of Ashkenazi Y chromosome DNA could be traced to the Near East, while his own study at the

University of Huddersfield The University of Huddersfield is a public research university located in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. It has been a University since 1992, but has its origins in a series of institutions dating back to the 19th century. It has made te ...

found that 80 percent of Ashkenazi

mitochondrial DNA Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA and mDNA) is the DNA located in the mitochondrion, mitochondria organelles in a eukaryotic cell that converts chemical energy from food into adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondrial DNA is a small portion of the D ...

could be traced to Europe, but with virtually no lineages from the North Caucasus. This implied a trend of European women marrying Near Eastern men, but provided no evidence to support the Khazar hypothesis. The claim that Ashkenazis as a whole take their origin from Khazars has been widely criticized as there is no direct evidence to support it.Melissa Hogenboom
"European link to Jewish maternal ancestry"

BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broad ...

, 9 October 2013. Using four Jewish groups, one being Ashkenazi, Kopelman ''et al'' found no evidence for the Khazar theory. While the consensus in genetic research is that the world's Jewish populations (including the Ashkenazim) share substantial genetic ancestry derived from a common Ancient Middle Eastern founder population, and that Ashkenazi Jews have no genetic ancestry attributable to Khazars. Some evidence suggests a close relationship of Jewish patrilineages (including those of the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Iraqi and Moroccan Jews) with those of the

Samaritans Samaritans (; ; ; ), are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Hebrews and Israelites of the ancient Near East. They are indigenous to Samaria, a historical region of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah that ...

, with some lineages sharing a common ancestry projected to the time of the Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel. , Hum Mutat 24:248–260, 2004.

Behar et al. studies

According to a 2010 study by

Doron Behar Doron may refer to: People Given name * Doron Almog (born 1951), Israeli soldier * Doron Ben-Ami (born 1965), Israeli archaeologist * Doron Egozi (born 1980), Israeli Olympic sport shooter * Doron Galezer (born 1952), Israeli journalist * Doron G ...

et al., Ashkenazi Jews form a "tight cluster" overlying non-Jewish samples from the

Levant The Levant ( ) is the subregion that borders the Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean sea to the west, and forms the core of West Asia and the political term, Middle East, ''Middle East''. In its narrowest sense, which is in use toda ...

with Sephardic, Middle Eastern and North African Jewish populations and

, results being "consistent with an historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant". In 2013 Behar et al. published a genetic study that came up with the conclusion that there isn't genetic evidence for the Khazar origin of Ashkenazi Jews, and instead Ashkenazi Jews are genetically closest to other Jewish groups and non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations. A 2003 study by Behar et al., found that Haplogroup R1a1a (R-M17) is present in over 50% of Ashkenazi

Levite Levites ( ; ) or Levi are Jewish males who claim patrilineal descent from the Tribe of Levi. The Tribe of Levi descended from Levi, the third son of Jacob and Leah. The surname ''Halevi'', which consists of the Hebrew definite article "" ''Ha-' ...

s (who comprise 4% of the Ashkenazi Jewish population). In 2008 David Goldstein asserted that based on the study a Khazar connection "now seems to me plausible, if not likely". Faerman (2008) states that "External low-level gene flow of possible Eastern European origin has been shown in Ashkenazim but no evidence of a hypothetical Khazars' contribution to the Ashkenazi gene pool has ever been found.". However, Behar and others made two more genetic studies on Ashkenazi Levites ending up with a different conclusion. The results of these studies showed that the R1a haplogroup present in Ashkenazi Levites is R1a-M582/R1a-Y2619 rather than R1a1a and originated in the Near East instead of Eastern Europe and was "likely a minor haplogroup among the Hebrews".Rootsi, Behar et al.
'Phylogenetic applications of whole Y-chromosome sequences and the Near Eastern origin of Ashkenazi Levites,'
Natures Communications 17 December 2013 A 2013 study by Rootsi, Behar et al. of Ashkenazi Levites found a high frequency of haplogroup R1a-M582 among them (64.9% of Ashkenazi Levites) pointing to a founding event and paternal ancestor common to half of them. Since R1a shows high frequency in Eastern Europe generally, it was thought possible, that the evidence might indicate the founder was a non-Jewish European. Testing the 3 hypotheses of a European, a Near Eastern or a Khazarian origin, their data excluded both the European and Khazarian origin of a Levite founder since they found no evidence of R1a-M582 Y-chromosomes was found in either group, other than singletons, while it occurs with significant frequency in Near Eastern regions Iranian Kerman,

Iranian Azeri Iranian Azerbaijanis (; ) are the largest ethnic minority of Iran. They are primarily found in and are native to the Iranian Azerbaijan region including provinces of ( East Azerbaijan, Ardabil, Zanjan, West Azerbaijan)

Elhaik et al. studies

argued in 2012 that: :"Strong evidence for the Khazarian hypothesis is the clustering of European Jews with the populations that in his opinion resided on opposite ends of ancient Khazaria: Armenians, Georgians, and

Azerbaijani Jews The history of the Jews in Azerbaijan dates back many centuries. Today, Jews in Azerbaijan mainly consist of three distinct groups: Mountain Jews, the most sizable and most ancient group; Ashkenazi Jews, who settled in the area during the late ...

. Because Caucasus populations remained relatively isolated in the Caucasus region and because there are no records of Caucasus populations mass-migrating to Eastern and Central Europe prior to the fall of Khazaria (Balanovsky et al. 2011), these findings imply a shared origin for European Jews and Caucasus populations." In later publications, Elhaik and his team modified their theory, proposing simply that the Judaised Khazar kingdom was a core transit area for a federation of Jewish merchants of mixed Iranian, Turkish and Slavic origins who, when that empire collapsed, relocated to Europe. Furthermore, in the 2016 study Das, Elhaik, Wexler et al. argued that the first Ashkenazi populations to speak the Yiddish language came from areas near four villages in Eastern Turkey along the Silk Road whose names derived from the word "Ashkenaz," rather than from Germanic lands as is the general consensus in scholarship. They proposed that Iranians, Greeks, Turks, and Slavs converted to Judaism in Anatolia prior to migrating to Khazaria where a small-scale conversion had already occurred. The historian Bernard Spolsky commenting on Elhaik's earlier study wrote. "Recently, Elhaik (2013) claims to have found evidence supporting the Khazarian origin of Ashkenazim, but the whole issue of genetic evidence remains uncertain." In 2018, Elhaik stated that the Ashkenazi maternal line is European and that only 3% of Ashkenazi DNA shows links with the Eastern Mediterranean/Middle East, a 'minuscule' amount comparable to the proportion of Neanderthal genes in modern European populations. For Elhaik, the vehicle by which unique Asiatic variations on Ashkenazi Y-chromosomes occurred, with Haplogroup Q-L275, was the Ashina ruling clan of the

Göktürks The Göktürks (; ), also known as Türks, Celestial Turks or Blue Turks, were a Turkic people in medieval Inner Asia. The Göktürks, under the leadership of Bumin Qaghan (d. 552) and his sons, succeeded the Rouran Khaganate as the main powe ...

, who converted to Judaism and established the Khazar empire.

Criticism of the Elhaik studies

Elhaik's 2012 study proved highly controversial. Several noted geneticists, among them

Marcus Feldman Marcus William Feldman (born 14 November 1942) is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational ...

Harry Ostrer Harry Ostrer (born May 15, 1951) is an American medical geneticist who investigates the genetic basis of common and rare disorders. In the diagnostic laboratory, he translates the findings of genetic discoveries into tests that can be used to ide ...

, and Michael Hammer have maintained—and the view has gained widespread support among scientists—that the worldwide Jewish population is related and shares common roots in the

Middle East The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...

, Feldman stated Elhaik's statistical analysis would not pass muster with most scientists; Hammer affirmed it was an outlier minority view without scientific support. Elhaik in reply described the group as "liars" and "frauds", noting Ostrer would not share genetic data that might be used "to defame the Jewish people". Elhaik's PhD supervisor Dan Graur, likewise dismissed them as a "clique", and said Elhaik is "combative" which is what science itself is. Elhaik's 2012 study was criticized in a 2013 paper in ''Human Biology'' for its use of Armenians and Azerbaijani Jews as proxies for Khazars and for using

Bedouin The Bedouin, Beduin, or Bedu ( ; , singular ) are pastorally nomadic Arab tribes who have historically inhabited the desert regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia (Iraq). The Bedouin originated in the Sy ...

and

Jordan Jordan, officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Jordan is bordered by Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, and Israel and the occupied Palestinian ter ...

ian

Hashemites The Hashemites (), also House of Hashim, are the royal family of Jordan, which they have ruled since 1921, and were the royal family of the kingdoms of Hejaz (1916–1925), Syria (1920), and Iraq (1921–1958). The family had ruled the city of Me ...

as a proxy for the Ancient Israelites. The former decision was criticized because Armenians were assumed to have a monolithic Caucasian ancestry, when as an Anatolian people (rather than Turkic) they contain many genetically Middle Eastern elements. Azerbaijani Jews are also assumed for the purposes of the study to have Khazarian ancestry, when

Mountain Jews Mountain Jews are the Mizrahi Jews, Mizrahi Jewish subgroup of the eastern and northern Caucasus, mainly Azerbaijan, and various republics in the Russian Federation: Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. M ...

are actually descended from

Persian Jews Iranian Jews, (; ) also Persian Jews ( ) or Parsim, constitute one of the oldest communities of the Jewish diaspora. Dating back to the History of ancient Israel and Judah, biblical era, they originate from the Jews who relocated to Iran (his ...

. The decision to cast Bedouin/Hashemites as "proto-Jews" was especially seen as political in nature, considering that both have origins in

Arab tribes The tribes of Arabia () have inhabited the Arabian Peninsula for thousands of years and traditionally trace their ancestry to one of two forefathers: Adnan, whose descendants originate from West Arabia, North Arabia, East Arabia, and Central A ...

from the

Arabian Peninsula The Arabian Peninsula (, , or , , ) or Arabia, is a peninsula in West Asia, situated north-east of Africa on the Arabian plate. At , comparable in size to India, the Arabian Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the world. Geographically, the ...

rather than from the Ancient Israelites, while the descent of the Jews from the Israelites is largely accepted. Geneticists conducting studies in Jewish genetics have challenged Elhaik's methods in his first paper. Michael Hammer called Elhaik's premise "unrealistic," calling Elhaik and other Khazarian hypothesis proponents "outlier folks … who have a minority view that's not supported scientifically. I think the arguments they make are pretty weak and stretching what we know."

, director of

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

's Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, echoes Hammer. "If you take all of the careful genetic population analysis that has been done over the last 15 years … there's no doubt about the common Middle Eastern origin," he said. He added that Elhaik's first paper "is sort of a one-off." Elhaik's statistical analysis would not pass muster with most contemporary scholars, Feldman said: "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."Rubin, Rita
"Jews a Race' Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert"
''

The Forward ''The Forward'' (), formerly known as ''The Jewish Daily Forward'', is an American news media organization for a Jewish American audience. Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily socialist newspaper, ''The New York Times'' reported that Set ...

'', 7 May 2013. Das, Elhaik and Wexler's 2016 study was challenged by the historian of Soviet and East European Jewry

, who dismissed it as 'basically nonsense', and the demographer

Sergio DellaPergola Sergio Della Pergola (; born 7 September 1942) is an Italian-born Israeli demographer, statistician, and professor. He is an expert in demography and statistics related to the global Jewish population. Biography Della Pergola was born to a Jewi ...

, who claimed it was a "falsification", whose methodology was defective in using a small population size and failing to factor in the genetic profiles of other Jews such as the

Sephardic Jews Sephardic Jews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the historic Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and their descendant ...

to whom the Ashkenazi Jews are closely related. Elhaik replied that factoring in the DNA of non-Ashkenazic Jews would not alter the genetic profile of Ashkenazi Jews, and that his team remained the largest genomic study of the latter to date, and the first to target Yiddish speakers."Prominent scholars blast theory tracing Ashkenazi Jews to Turkey"
JTA, 3 May 2016 The Yiddish scholar Marion Aptroot states "Seen from the standpoint of the humanities, certain aspects of the article by Das et al. fall short of established standards." Recently, a study by a team of biologists and linguists, led by Pavel Flegontov, a specialist in genomics, published a response to Das, Elhaik and Wexler's 2016 study, criticizing their methodology and conclusions. They argue that GPS works to allow inferences for the origins of modern populations with an unadmixed genome, but not for tracing ancestries back 1,000 years ago. In their view, the paper tried to fit Wexler's 'marginal and unsupported interpretation' of Yiddish into a model that only permits valid deductions for recent unadmixed populations. They also criticized the linguistic aspect of the study on the grounds that "all methods of historical linguistics concur that Yiddish is a Germanic language, with no reliable evidence for Slavic, Iranian, or Turkic substrata." They further describe the purported "Slavo-Iranian confederation" as "a historically meaningless term invented by the authors under review."

also takes issue with Elhaik's findings on linguistic grounds, similarly arguing that Yiddish

onomastics Onomastics (or onomatology in older texts) is the study of proper names, including their etymology, history, and use. An ''alethonym'' ('true name') or an ''orthonym'' ('real name') is the proper name of the object in question, the object of onom ...

lacks traces of a Turkic component. He concludes that theories of a Khazar connection are either speculative or simply wrong and "cannot be taken seriously."

Antisemitism

United Kingdom and United States

Maurice Fishberg and Roland B. Dixon's works were later exploited in racist and religious polemical literature, by advocates of

British Israelism British Israelism (also called Anglo-Israelism) is a pseudo-historical belief that the people of Great Britain are "genetically, racially, and linguistically the direct descendants" of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel. With roots in the ...

, in both

Britain Britain most often refers to: * Great Britain, a large island comprising the countries of England, Scotland and Wales * The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a sovereign state in Europe comprising Great Britain and the north-eas ...

and the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. Particularly after the publication of

Burton J. Hendrick Burton Jesse Hendrick (December 8, 1870 – March 23, 1949), born in New Haven, Connecticut, was an American author. While attending Yale University, Hendrick was editor of both ''The Yale Courant'' and '' The Yale Literary Magazine''. He receive ...

‘s ''The Jews in America'' (1923) it began to enjoy a vogue among advocates of immigration restrictions in the 1920s; racial theorists like

Lothrop Stoddard Theodore Lothrop Stoddard (June 29, 1883 – May 1, 1950) was an American historian, journalist, political scientist and white supremacist. Stoddard wrote several books which advocated eugenics, white supremacy, Nordicism, and scientific raci ...

; antisemitic

conspiracy theorists A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy (generally by powerful sinister groups, often political in motivation), when other explanations are more probable.Additional sources: * ...

such as the

Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to KKK or Klan, is an American Protestant-led Christian terrorism, Christian extremist, white supremacist, Right-wing terrorism, far-right hate group. It was founded in 1865 during Reconstruction era, ...

’s

Hiram Wesley Evans Hiram Wesley Evans (September 26, 1881 – September 14, 1966) was an American dentist and political activist who served as the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an American white supremacist group, from 1922 to his resignation in 1939. ...

; and

anti-communist Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when th ...

polemicists such as John O. Beaty In 1938,

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

, then strongly identifying with the

Fascist Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural soci ...

regime of

Benito Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who, upon assuming office as Prime Minister of Italy, Prime Minister, became the dictator of Fascist Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 un ...

, sent a query to fellow poet

Louis Zukofsky Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge a ...

concerning the Khazars after someone had written to him claiming that the ancient Jews had died out and that modern Jews were of Khazar descent. He returned to the issue in 1955, apparently influenced by a book called ''Facts Are Facts'', which pushed the Jewish-Khazar descent theory, and which for Pound had dug up "a few savoury morsels". The booklet in question, by a

Roman Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...

convert from

, was an antisemitic tirade written to David Goldstein after the latter had converted to

Catholicism The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

. John O. Beaty was an antisemitic,

McCarthyite McCarthyism is a political practice defined by the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United St ...

professor of

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

at SMU, author of ''The Iron Curtain over America'' (Dallas 1952). According to him, "the Khazar Jews were responsible for all of America's – and the world's ills," beginning with

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

. The book had little impact until the former Wall Street broker and oil tycoon J. Russell Maguire promoted it. A similar position was adopted by Wilmot Robertson, whose views influenced

David Duke David Ernest Duke (born July 1, 1950) is an American politician, neo-Nazi, conspiracy theorist, and former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. From 1989 to 1992, he was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for the ...

. The British author

Douglas Reed Douglas Lancelot Reed (11 March 1895 – 26 August 1976) was a British novelist and political commentator. His book ''Insanity Fair'' (1938) examined the state of Europe and the megalomania of Adolf Hitler before World War II. Subsequently, Reed b ...

has also been influential. In his work the Ashkenazi are false Jews, descendants of the Khazars. A number of different variants of the theory came to be exploited by the

Christian Identity Christian Identity (also known as Identity Christianity) is an interpretation of Christianity which advocates the belief that only Celtic and Germanic peoples, such as the Anglo-Saxon, Nordic nations, or the Aryan race and kindred peoples, are ...

movement. The Christian Identity movement, which took shape from the 1940s to the 1970s, had its roots in British Israelism which had been planted on American evangelical soil in the late 19th century. By the 1960s the Khazar ancestry theory was an article of faith in the Christian Identity movement. The

movement has associated two verses from the

New Testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...

Revelation 2:9
an
3:9
with the Khazars. Jeffrey Kaplan calls these two passages the cornerstone of Identity theology. He also reports that Christian Identity literature makes selective references to the

Babylonian Talmud The Talmud (; ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the centerpiece of Jewi ...

, while the works of Francis Parker Yockey and Arthur Koestler work are raised almost to the status of Holy Writ. The idea has also been promoted by contemporary antisemitic groups on social media, according to the Anti-Defamation League and the

American Jewish Committee The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is a civil rights group and Jewish advocacy group established on November 11, 1906. It is one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations and, according to ''The New York Times'', is "widely regarded as the wi ...

Soviet Union and Russia

The theory was prominent in

Soviet antisemitism The February Revolution in Russia officially ended a centuries-old regime of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, legally abolishing the Pale of Settlement. However, the previous legacy of antisemitism was continued and furthered by the Soviet sta ...

, gaining a place in Soviet historiography. The theory influenced Soviet historians including

Boris Rybakov Boris Aleksandrovich Rybakov (; 3 June 1908, Moscow – 27 December 2001, Moscow) was a Soviet and Russian archeologist and historian. He was one of the main proponents of anti-Normanist vision of Russian history. He is the father of Indologis ...

, Mikhail Artamonov and

Lev Gumilyov Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev (also Gumilyov; ; – 15 June 1992) was a Soviet and Russian historian, ethnologist, anthropologist and translator. He had a reputation for his highly unorthodox theories of ethnogenesis and historiosophy. He was an ...

and was used to support soviet political theory. Artamonov argued that the Khazars had played an important role in the development of Rus’. Rybakov disputed this view, instead regarding the Khazar state as parasitic. Official Soviet views on the Khazars hardened after December 1951 when

Pravda ''Pravda'' ( rus, Правда, p=ˈpravdə, a=Ru-правда.ogg, 'Truth') is a Russian broadsheet newspaper, and was the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most in ...

published a critical review of Artamonov's work under the pen name P. Ivanov. Rybakov for his part denied that he was Ivanov. (Sand has speculated that Ivanov was in fact Stalin.) According to Sand, in Ivanov's review the Khazars were regarded as parasites and enemies. Ivanov's views became the certified Soviet position. Lev Gumilyov's theory of ethnogenesis draws heavily on the Khazars theory. For Gumilyov ethnicity was defined by stereotypical behavior which was linked to adaption to the terrain. He regarded Jews as a parasitic, international urban class. The Jews had dominated the Khazars creating a

chimera Chimera, Chimaera, or Chimaira (Greek for " she-goat") originally referred to: * Chimera (mythology), a fire-breathing monster of ancient Lycia said to combine parts from multiple animals * Mount Chimaera, a fire-spewing region of Lycia or Cilicia ...

, subjecting Rus’ to the "Khazar Yoke." Since the 1970s the term Khazars has entered the Russian nationalist lexicon, being used as a euphemism for Jews. Vadim V. Kozhinov theorized that the Khazar Yoke was more dangerous to Rus´ than the Tatar Yoke. The Khazars were imagined as a persistent danger to Rus’. After the

dissolution of the Soviet Union The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Declaration No. 142-Н of ...

the theory maintained a role in Russian antisemitism. Contemporary Russian antisemites continue to perpetuate the Khazar myth. Gumilyov's and his students' works remain popular in Russia. "Khazars" and "ethnic chimera" have become preferred terms for antisemitic Russian chauvinists.

Germany

The Khazar hypothesis was promoted by the former Nazi scholar

Herman Wirth Hermann Felix Wirth (alternatively referred to as Herman Wirth Roeper Bosch or Herman Felix Wirth (although spelled ''Hermann'' on his birth certificate); 6 May 1885 in Utrecht – 16 February 1981 in Kusel) was a Dutch-German historian, a schol ...

(1885-1981), who wrote an anti-Semitic legal report in 1958 that questioned the origins of the Jewish People and relativized the Holocaust. It was central to his ''

Palestinabuch The Palestinabuch (''Book of Palestine''), also Palestina Buch, Palästinabuch or Palästina Buch, is an allegedly lost manuscript by the German-Dutch historian and antisemite Herman Wirth (1885–1981), founder of the German ''Ahnenerbe'', which i ...

'' (''Book of Palestine''), the extensive manuscript of which was lost for unclear reasons in the 1970s. It was his theory that the Ashkenazi Jews descended from a superstitious slave people (Khazars) on the fringes of a mythical Nordic civilization (

Shambhala Shambhala (, ),Śambhala m. (also written Sambhala): Name of a town (situated between the Rathaprā and Ganges, and identified by some with Sambhal in Moradabad; the town or district of Śambhala is fabled to be the place where Kalki, the last ...

) in the

Gobi desert The Gobi Desert (, , ; ) is a large, cold desert and grassland region in North China and southern Mongolia. It is the sixth-largest desert in the world. The name of the desert comes from the Mongolian word ''gobi'', used to refer to all of th ...

. According to Wirth, Christ descended from a lost tribe of the original Aryans, who had left their traces in the Near East in the form of

Megalithic monuments A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a prehistoric structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. More than 35,000 megalithic structures have been identified across Europe, ranging geographically f ...

. The ''Palestinabuch'' was meant as a counterpart to Wirth's '' Ura Linda Chronicle'' (1933) on the ancient

Frisians The Frisians () are an ethnic group indigenous to the German Bight, coastal regions of the Netherlands, north-western Germany and southern Denmark. They inhabit an area known as Frisia and are concentrated in the Dutch provinces of Friesland an ...

, whom he considered direct descendants of the first

Aryans ''Aryan'' (), or ''Arya'' (borrowed from Sanskrit ''ārya''),Oxford English Dictionary Online 2024, s.v. ''Aryan'' (adj. & n.); ''Arya'' (n.)''.'' is a term originating from the ethno-cultural self-designation of the Indo-Iranians. It stood i ...

and whose origins he located in Palestine. It was officially titled ''The Riddle of the Palestine's Megalithic Graves: From JAU to Jesus''. By 1969 the proposed title had changed into ''Between the North Sea and the Sea of Genezareth'', implicitly referring to an influential book by the 19th-century German reactionary

Julius Langbehn Julius Langbehn (26 March 1851 – 30 April 1907) was a German national Romantic art historian and philosopher. He was born in Hadersleben, Schleswig (now Haderslev in Denmark), and died in Rosenheim. Biography Langbehn was born in Hadersleben ...

. The myth of the lost ''Palestinabuch'' was promoted by the Chilean fascist and anti-Semite

Miguel Serrano Miguel Joaquín Diego del Carmen Serrano Fernández (10 September 1917 – 28 February 2009), was a Chilean diplomat, writer, neopagan occultism, occultist, defender of a doctrine that supposedly would be true Christianity, the "Kristianism" an ...

and picked up by the Russian political theorist Alexandr Dugin, who devoted his indicative book ''Hyperborean Theory'' (1993) to Herman Wirth’s legacy. Wirth’s ideas were also echoed by the German conspiracy theorist Jan van Helsing, who wrote several influential books on secret societies, as well as by the

New Age New Age is a range of Spirituality, spiritual or Religion, religious practices and beliefs that rapidly grew in Western world, Western society during the early 1970s. Its highly eclecticism, eclectic and unsystematic structure makes a precise d ...

influencer

David Icke David Vaughan Icke ( ; born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist, author and a former Association football, footballer and sports broadcaster. He has written over 20 books, self-published since the mid-1990s, and spoken in more tha ...

Cults

Aum Shinrikyo , better known by their former name , is a Japanese new religions, Japanese new religious movement and doomsday cult founded by Shoko Asahara in 1987. It carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 and was found to have been respo ...

is a Japanese

doomsday cult A doomsday cult is a cult that believes in apocalypticism and millenarianism, including both those that predict disaster and those that attempt to destroy the entire universe. Sociologist John Lofland coined the term ''doomsday cult'' in his 19 ...

. The cult was active in Japan and Russia, with an estimated 10,000 and 30,000 followers respectively. The group's ''Manual of Fear'' used ''

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' is a fabricated text purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination. Largely plagiarized from several earlier sources, it was first published in Imperial Russia in 1903, translated into multip ...

'' in addition to other antisemitic material. The manual claimed that the Jews are really Khazars intent on world domination. The Khazar theory has also become part of the

Ascended Masters Ascended masters, also known as Mahatmas, are believed in several theosophical and related spiritual traditions to be spiritually enlightened beings who in past incarnations were ordinary humans. Through a series of spiritual transformations, ...

theology. Hatonn, an extraterrestrial, transmits messages including the complete text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He identifies the authors of The Protocols as Khazars and speaks of false Zionist Jews who have usurped and controlled the true Jews.

Black Hebrew Israelites

In the United States, extremist sects of

Black Hebrew Israelites Black Hebrew Israelites (also called Hebrew Israelites, Black Hebrews, Black Israelites, and African Hebrew Israelites) are a new religious movement claiming that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites. Some sub-groups ...

have promoted the antisemitic Khazar conspiracy theory about Jewish origins. These groups believe that Jewish people are "imposters" and that

African-Americans African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...

(sometimes

Native Native may refer to: People * '' Jus sanguinis'', nationality by blood * '' Jus soli'', nationality by location of birth * Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory ** Nat ...

and

Latin Americans Latin Americans (; ) are the citizens of Latin American countries (or people with cultural, ancestral or national origins in Latin America). Latin American countries and their diasporas are multi-ethnic and multi-racial. Latin Americans are ...

also) are the true descendants of the Israelites.

Notes

Citations

Sources

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

*Rory Miller(2020
The anti-Zionist ‘Jewish Khazar’ syndrome in the official British mind
*Fishberg, Maurice (1911)
The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.

The Kievan Letter scan
in the

Cambridge University Library Cambridge University Library is the main research library of the University of Cambridge. It is the largest of over 100 libraries Libraries of the University of Cambridge, within the university. The library is a major scholarly resource for me ...

collection.
Khazaria.com

Resources - Medieval Jewish History - The Khazars
The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Khazar Historic Maps

* ttp://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1023383.html Ancient lost capital of the Khazar kingdom found {{Authority control Anti-Zionism Ashkenazi Jews topics Antisemitic tropes Conspiracy theories involving Jews Fringe theories Jewish genetics Judaism-related controversies Khazars Origin hypotheses of ethnic groups Population genetics Pseudohistory Scientific controversies Zionism and antisemitism

History

1806–1918

Interwar years, 1918–1939

1939–1945

1950–1976

1976–present: Koestler, ''The Thirteenth Tribe'' and contemporary views

Genetics and the Khazar theory

Behar et al. studies

Elhaik et al. studies

Criticism of the Elhaik studies

Antisemitism

United Kingdom and United States

Soviet Union and Russia

Germany

Cults

Black Hebrew Israelites

See also

Notes

Citations

Sources

External links