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| "Battle Scene," Folio from a Zafarnama (Book of Victories) of Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi |
Jews aren’t really Jews, according to PA President Mahmoud
Abbas, but Khazars, a nomadic Turkic people. These “Khazar Jews” Abbas claims,
have no connection to the Land of Israel, just an invented history and a false
narrative of religious rights to the Land of Israel. This, of course, is an
inversion of the truth. In reality, it is the “Palestinians” who are an
invented people with an invented history, and an invented religious right to Jewish
territory. By now there is a large body of definitive proof that the Jews are
not descended from the Khazars, but those who hate Israel are not interested in
either proof or truth.
The purpose of the Khazar myth is to delegitimize all Jewish
claims to Israeli territory while spreading the lie that the land in question
belongs to others. It’s an if/then proposition. If Jews are Khazars, they have
no legitimate claims to Jewish land, which makes them thieves. Except that the Jews
are not Khazars. They are Jews. And for thousands of years, Jews have been overwhelmingly
endogamous—they marry each other. Abbas says otherwise, because it serves his
interests, the main interest being taking land away from the Jews.
Abbas stands truth on its head. The land, he asserts, doesn’t belong to those Khazar Jews, but to his constituents—if you can call them that, when there hasn’t been an election since Abbas assumed office in 2005. Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, reported on remarks made by Abbas to “various Palestinian intellectuals,” in a 2021 meeting (emphasis added):
[At the meeting he held, PA] President [Mahmoud Abbas] debunked the Zionist fairy tale, which some call the Jewish Israeli narrative…
The president spoke about the 9th century pagan Tatar-Khazar kingdom, which was established in the Caspian Sea area. It underwent attacks and suffered from wars, and therefore its king sought advice to be saved from this situation. His friend, a Jewish man, advised him to convert. The kingdom followed in his footsteps, and it also converted. It remained like this until the 11th century when the kingdom finally collapsed, and [its residents] scattered in neighboring states. These are the Ashkenazis, who were not originally Jews but rather converted.
But this is a lie, as borne out by science. Jews are endogamous:
they marry each other (or did until modern times). A study on Ashkenazi hereditary diseases published in
2022, speaks of historically endogamous marriage practices in Judaism in
general, and how marrying within the tribe impacted Ashkenazi Jewry in
particular:
Judaism is a shared religious and cultural identity, with endogamous marriage practices and distinctive diasporic histories of communities worldwide, particularly a Levantine origin and complex history of migrations over the last ∼2.5 millennia. Present-day Ashkenazim are descendants of medieval Jewish populations with histories primarily in northern and eastern Europe. As a result, they carry distinctive ancestries, and Jewish and non-Jewish medieval individuals living in the same regions would likely show characteristic patterns of genetic variation.
Hereditary disorders in Ashkenazi Jewish populations have been the focus of considerable medical research, with genetic screening now commonplace to mitigate risks. Their prevalence is generally attributed to strong genetic drift during Ashkenazi population bottlenecks, coupled with high endogamy, although other processes such as heterozygote advantage have been proposed.
Candidate population bottlenecks include the phase of dispersion following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the formation of Ashkenazi communities in northern Europe during the medieval period, antisemitic persecution arising from the Crusades, unfounded reprisals for the Black Death, and the movement from western and central Europe to eastern Europe that preceded rapid population growth from the 15th to 18th centuries.
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| Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium manuscript, 1376/77) |
As we see, the Jews are no Khazars, they married within; but
no matter, because Abbas has a useful idiot Jew to lend him credibility. More
from the Muwaffaq Matar report:
As proof, the president brought the book ‘The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire [and its Heritage]’ by Jewish-Hungarian author and historian Arthur Koestler.
The Jews never were a people and they never will be. The Zionist organization will continue to invent its own history and transpose it into the books of human knowledge, and even into the holy books, in all languages. This is in order to achieve the goal of mobilizing and gathering enough human ammunition [i.e., immigrants] to carry out missions of occupation and settlement, which the colonialist world powers and empires imposed on it.
Since the late 19th century, the so-called “Khazarian theory” has promoted the idea that a bulk of Ashkenazic Jews living in Eastern Europe descended from medieval Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people who founded a powerful polyethnic state in the Caucasus and north to the Caspian, Azov and Black seas. The theory received a recent boost with the 1976 publication of “The Thirteenth Tribe,” a book by Arthur Koestler. Most recently, the Khazarian hypothesis has been promoted by authors like the Tel Aviv University professor of history Shlomo Sand and Tel Aviv University professor of linguistics Paul Wexler, as well the geneticist Eran Elhaik.
Despite this institutional backing, the theory is absolutely without evidence. As any historian will tell you, generations of Jews, like generations of any people, leave historical traces behind them. These traces come in multiple forms. For starters, people leave behind them historical documents and archaeological data. Predictably, archaeologic evidence about the widespread existence of Jews in Khazaria is almost nonexistent. While a series of independent sources does testify to the existence in the 10th century of Jews in the Kingdom of Khazaria, and while some of these sources also indicate that the ruling elite of Khazaria embraced Judaism, the Khazarian state was destroyed by Russians during the 960s. In other words, we can be confident that Judaism was not particularly widespread in that kingdom.
A later report by Matar on the meeting between Abbas and the so-called “Palestinian intellectuals” details the PA president’s sickening assertions of a connection between Nazism and Zionism. Hitler’s “Jewish question,” according to Abbas, arose from the failure of the “Khazar Jews” to properly integrate into European society:
We must focus on what the president said regarding the [Jewish] question or ‘the Jewish problem,’ because its cause is that the Jews of the Khazar kingdom did not integrate in the European societies.
[PA] President Mahmoud Abbas presented those present with a concise historical survey, such that dealt intensively with the injustice caused to the Palestinians when the world powers – and foremost among them the US and Britain – agreed to the theft of the homeland and land and to granting them as a gift to the Zionist movement, which is an inseparable part of the international colonialist movement.
President Mahmoud Abbas was clear when he said that inflaming the dreams of the Jews and realizing these dreams within a political entity was not the fruit of the efforts of the Jews themselves, but rather colonialist-theological plans and visions of colonialist world powers, as the modern-day Jews are mostly of Tatar origin. They are descendants of dynasties that established a kingdom in the 9th century called ‘the Khazar kingdom.’ In this statement, it appears that President Mahmoud Abbas sought to say that the colonialist world powers used the Jews in order to execute the great colonialist plan – dismantling the Ottoman Empire and afterwards dismantling the Arab nation.
According to Ehud
Yaari, this too is a lot of hooey (emphasis added):
It should be noted that Abbas has his facts about the Khazar empire wrong: the Khazars were not Tatars—rather they were a Turkic people—and [the conversion of the royal dynasty and aristocracy as reported by medieval sources] took place, according to most historians, sometime between 740 and 865 CE. His Prime Minister, Muhammad Shtayeh, also had his dates wrong when declaring on June 26, 2021: “Present day Jews are Khazar Jews, who converted to Judaism in the 6th century.” Regardless of the historical inaccuracies about the Khazar dynasty itself, both statements are instead the product of a more recent and dangerous historical trend, reviving the case offered by the late Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, against the justification of a Jewish homeland. These assertions follow in the vein of numerous Arab writers who have produced a number of volumes over the past five decades identifying the Ashkenazi communities as refugees from the destruction of the Khazar Qaganate by Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev c.965 CE.
Promoting this narrative has not just been the effort of Palestinian and Syrian politicians; many Egyptian, Saudi, and Lebanese intellectuals have also been drawn to a narrative that deprives contemporary Jews of pre-medieval Jewish lineage and history connecting them back to the land. Books dealing with the subject are still on sale all over the region and these theories are widely available across the internet.
This approach is deeply rooted in a widely popular theme of Soviet anti-Semitism, prevalent in many of the institutions where a number of Arab intellectuals studied. In a state where history became subservient to the reigning ideology, Soviet historians depicted the conversion of the Khazars as a humiliation of the Russians, poisoning their values and beliefs and sowing corruption in society. In a famous article published in Pravda (1951) under the pseudonym “Ivanov”—posited to be Stalin himself—an argument was put forth that it would be “shameful” to accept that a Jewish empire governed the vast area between the Caspian and the Black Seas before the appearance of the early Russian princes. This became the official interpretation of the Khazars, mixing dangerously with contemporary accusations of a “Jewish nationalistic plot.” Abbas would have acquainted himself with these concepts while writing his Holocaust-denying Ph.D in Moscow twenty years later.
Abbas was indeed well acquainted with these concepts. In May 2018, Abbas gave a speech to the
Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PA, in which he claimed
that the nonsensical Khazar theory is backed by Jewish sources:
The sons of Jacob were 12. Where did you bring 13 from? They invented it. Where? In the Khazar Kingdom. When? In the 9th century. It was an irreligious kingdom. Afterwards it became a Jewish kingdom. The emperor converted to Judaism and therefore [the kingdom] converted to Judaism. Afterwards it broke apart, and all its residents migrated to Europe, and these are the Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites, and they have no connection to Semitism or Abraham, Jacob, or others. It was a Tatar-Turkic state...
...Now we are talking about the Jewish homeland. They are talking about longing for Zion and that's why they are going [there] and so forth. I say - not me, rather history says that these words are baseless.
But in fact, science says the baseless idea is the one in
which Jews have a Khazar origin story. A 2014 Wayne State University study, No
Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews, concludes:
Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of population-genetic structure, we found that Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East. No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations from the Caucasus is evident, particularly populations that most closely represent the Khazar region. Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations, and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either from within or from north of the Caucasus region.
And still, as late as August
24, 2023, Abbas was still spouting his wildly embroidered Khazar lies. MEMRI
shared these excerpts:
The truth that we should clarify to the world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism. . .The story began in 900 CE, in the Khazar Kingdom on the Caspian Sea. It was a Tatar kingdom that converted to Judaism. . . [In the 11th century], this empire collapsed, and all its population left to the north and to the west. They left for Russia and Western and Eastern Europe. They spread there, and they are the forefathers of Ashkenazi Jews. So when we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism – the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites.
Everybody knows that during World War I, Hitler was a sergeant. He said he fought the Jews because they were dealing with usury and money. In his view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them. We just want to make this point clear. This was not about Semitism and antisemitism.
As for the eastern Jews, they are Semites, because all of them originated in the Arabian Peninsula and they traveled to Al-Andalus, and then came back. We are familiar with this history.
Actually, they are familiar not with history but with lies. Since
2006, the world has known that two fifths of
Ashkenazi Jews are descended from four women. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich reported
on the discovery by a team of Israeli geneticists:
The team, which studied mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) passed on solely by mothers to their children, found evidence of shared maternal ancestry of Ashkenazi and non–Ashkenazi Jews, a finding showing a shared ancestral pool that is consistent with previous studies that were based on the Y chromosome. This evidence pointed to a similar pattern of shared paternal ancestry of Jewish populations around the world originating in the Middle East. They concluded that the four founding types of mtDNA—likely to be of Middle Eastern origin—underwent a major overall expansion in Europe over the last thousand years.
The “four founding mothers,” [Professor Skorecki] added, “are from lineages that originate long before the launching of the Jewish people some 3400 years ago. They probably came from a large Middle Eastern gene pool.
“As consistent with the Bible, in which the founding Jews were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his sons, and the matriarchs were ‘imported’ from non–Jewish peoples and then converted, the haplotypes of contemporary Jewish men are much less varied.”
Is there any truth to the idea that the Khazars converted to Judaism? According to Prof. Shaul Stampfer, no. The research simply does not support this idea:
Did the Khazars convert to Judaism? The view that some or all Khazars, a central Asian people, became Jews during the ninth or tenth century is widely accepted. But following an exhaustive analysis of the evidence, Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher Prof. Shaul Stampfer has concluded that such a conversion, “while a splendid story,” never took place. . .
From roughly the seventh to tenth centuries, the Khazars ruled an empire spanning the steppes between the Caspian and Black Seas. Not much is known about Khazar culture and society: they did not leave a literary heritage and the archaeological finds have been meager. The Khazar Empire was overrun by Svyatoslav of Kiev around the year 969, and little was heard from the Khazars after. Yet a widely held belief that the Khazars or their leaders at some point converted to Judaism persists.
Reports about the Jewishness of the Khazars first appeared in Muslim works in the late ninth century and in two Hebrew accounts in the tenth century. The story reached a wider audience when the Jewish thinker and poet Yehudah Halevi used it as a frame for his book The Kuzari. Little attention was given to the issue in subsequent centuries, but a key collection of Hebrew sources on the Khazars appeared in 1932 followed by a little-known six-volume history of the Khazars written by the Ukrainian scholar Ahatanhel Krymskyi. Henri Gregoire published skeptical critiques of the sources, but in 1954 Douglas Morton Dunlop brought the topic into the mainstream of accepted historical scholarship with The History of the Jewish Khazars. Arthur Koestler’s best-selling The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) brought the tale to the attention of wider Western audiences, arguing that East European Ashkenazi Jewry was largely of Khazar origin. Many studies have followed, and the story has also garnered considerable non-academic attention; for example, Shlomo Sand’s 2009 bestseller, The Invention of the Jewish People, advanced the thesis that the Khazars became Jews and much of East European Jewry was descended from the Khazars. But despite all the interest, there was no systematic critique of the evidence for the conversion claim other than a stimulating but very brief and limited paper by Moshe Gil of Tel Aviv University.
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| Professor Shaul Stampfer |
Stampfer notes that scholars who have contributed to the subject based their arguments on a limited corpus of textual and numismatic evidence. Physical evidence is lacking: archaeologists excavating in Khazar lands have found almost no artifacts or grave stones displaying distinctly Jewish symbols. He also reviews various key pieces of evidence that have been cited in relation to the conversion story, including historical and geographical accounts, as well as documentary evidence. Among the key artifacts are an apparent exchange of letters between the Spanish Jewish leader Hasdai ibn Shaprut and Joseph, king of the Khazars; an apparent historical account of the Khazars, often called the Cambridge Document or the Schechter Document; various descriptions by historians writing in Arabic; and many others.
Taken together, Stampfer says, these sources offer a cacophony of distortions, contradictions, vested interests, and anomalies in some areas, and nothing but silence in others. A careful examination of the sources shows that some are falsely attributed to their alleged authors, and others are of questionable reliability and not convincing. Many of the most reliable contemporary texts, such as the detailed report of Sallam the Interpreter, who was sent by Caliph al-Wathiq in 842 to search for the mythical Alexander’s wall; and a letter of the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicholas, written around 914 that mentions the Khazars, say nothing about their conversion.
Citing the lack of any reliable source for the conversion story, and the lack of credible explanations for sources that suggest otherwise or are inexplicably silent, Stampfer concludes that the simplest and most convincing answer is that the Khazar conversion is a legend with no factual basis. There never was a conversion of a Khazar king or of the Khazar elite, he says.
Years of research went into this paper, and Stampfer ruefully noted that "Most of my research until now has been to discover and clarify what happened in the past. I had no idea how difficult and challenging it would be to prove that something did not happen."
In terms of its historical implications, Stampfer says the lack of a credible basis for the conversion story means that many pages of Jewish, Russian and Khazar history have to be rewritten. If there never was a conversion, issues such as Jewish influence on early Russia and ethnic contact must be reconsidered.
Stampfer describes the persistence of the Khazar conversion legend as a fascinating application of Thomas Kuhn’s thesis on scientific revolution to historical research. Kuhn points out the reluctance of researchers to abandon familiar paradigms even in the face of anomalies, instead coming up with explanations that, though contrived, do not require abandoning familiar thought structures. It is only when “too many” anomalies accumulate that it is possible to develop a totally different paradigm—such as a claim that the Khazar conversion never took place.
Stampfer concludes, "We must admit that sober studies by historians do not always make for great reading, and that the story of a Khazar king who became a pious and believing Jew was a splendid story.” However, in his opinion, "There are many reasons why it is useful and necessary to distinguish between fact and fiction – and this is one more such case."
Mahmoud Abbas lies like a rug and he repeats the same lies over
and over again as if they were fact. His constituents and Jew-haters at large already
know the drill. Abbas says it, and the Jew-hating echo chamber will happily repeat
the false narrative until it takes on a life of its own. Mark Twain said that “A
lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its
shoes.”
Lies spread like wildfire; they have power. We see it with Mahmoud
Abbas and the Khazar origin story. The more Abbas repeats his lies about Jewish
lineage, the less anyone cares to hear the truth. The truth simply no longer
matters; it has been rendered irrelevant.
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