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Khazar myth

Khazar myth, also known as the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi origin, is a disproven claim that European Jews mostly or only descended from the Khazars. There is no scientific evidence for this myth, according to decades of peer-reviewed genetic studies.[1][2][3][4][5]

Background

Khazars

Main page: Khazars

The Khazars were a confederation of Turkic peoples who set up multiple kingdoms – known as khanates – across Central Asia and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. Some Khazars had a conversion to Judaism.[6][7][8][9] Some people say that it is possible that some of them fled to other parts of Eastern Europe and Central Europe after the fall of the Khazar empire and that they married other kinds of Jews.

Origin

French scholar Ernest Renan may have created the Khazar myth on January 27, 1883 with his lecture "Judaism as Race and as Religion".[10][11][12] In April 1883, the Russian Jewish periodical Voskhod printed a translation of Renan's lecture into the Russian language.[13] But earlier, in 1842, the German Jewish writer Eliakim Carmoly presented the belief that some Jews, some of them being Israelites, had moved from Khazaria to Poland.[14]

It has been promoted in antisemitic ways[15][16][17][18] by fascists,[19] Christian Identity,[20] Neo-Nazis,[15] Arab nationalists,[21] Russian nationalists,[22][23] and the Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) movement.[24]

Meanwhile, a small number of Jewish writers did not reject the theory, like Sámuel Kohn,[25] Isidore Loeb,[26] Bernard Drachman,[27] Salo Baron,[28] Cecil Roth,[29] Abba Eban,[30] and Zvi Ankori.[31]

A propaganda poster made by the Black Hebrew Israelites implying that Black and Native Americans are the "real" descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The Black Hebrew Israelites allege that the said peoples have been "wrongfully" classified by White imperialists into different ethnic groups across the Western hemisphere.

In the 1940s, British people who supported the Arab side promoted the Khazar myth among Arabs to try to stop Zionism.[32] At a 1947 UN conference on the Partition Plan for Palestine, Arab nationalist speakers Faris al-Khoury and Jamal Al-Husseini cited the Khazar myth to deny that Jews have a historical connection to Israel and oppose the creation of the modern State of Israel.[21]

Research

History teacher Israel Bartal wrote that no medieval writings exist that say that Khazar Jews moved to Poland or Lithuania.[33] Linguistics teacher Wolf Moskovich said based on his research it is "very doubtful" that Turkic Khazars were the main ancestors of Eastern European Jews.[34]

The Khazar myth is an unscientific[5] theory. In several papers, Israeli-American scholar Eran Elhaik claimed he had evidence that Ashkenazi Jews have much Khazar ancestry. Several other biologists criticized Elhaik and conducted genetic studies that disproved his claims.[1][35][36] In response, Elhaik called the biologists "liars" and "frauds".[36] His papers have given support to anti-Zionists and antisemites who promote the Khazar myth.[37]

Most scientific studies state that Ashkenazi Jews do have a large genetic relationship to Jewish and non-Jewish peoples living in the Middle East.[3][38] They have only a small degree of relation to peoples living in Central Asia, North Asia, and the North Caucasus — lands where Khazars came from and lived.[2] One such connection is between the Ashkenazi Jewish haplogroup N9a3a1b1 and the Turkic Bashkirs in N9a3a1b.[39][40]

Khazar Myth Media

  • Khazar Khaganate, 650–850

Related pages

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Behar, Doron M.. No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews. Human Biology 85 (6) (December 2013). p. 859–900. doi:10.3378/027.085.0604.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations. BMC Genetics 10 (December 2009). p. 80. doi:10.1186/1471-2156-10-80.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Behar, Doron M.. The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people. Nature 466 (7303) (July 2010). p. 238–242. doi:10.1038/nature09103.
  4. ↑ Bray, Steven M.. Signatures of founder effects, admixture, and selection in the Ashkenazi Jewish population. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107 (37) (September 14, 2010). p. 16222–16227. doi:10.1073/pnas.1004381107.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Beider, Alexander (2017). "Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Khazars. Here's The Proof". Forward. https://forward.com/opinion/382967/ashkenazi-jews-are-not-khazars-heres-the-proof/?attribution=author-article-listing-14-headline. Retrieved 1 January 2019. 
  6. ↑ Pritsak, Omeljan. The Khazar Kingdom's Conversion to Judaism. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3 (2) (September 1978). p. 261–281.
  7. ↑ Golden, Peter B.. Khazaria and Judaism. Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 3 (1983). p. 127–156.
  8. ↑ Shapira, Dan. Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture 3 (2008)ABC-CLIO. p. 1097–1104. ISBN 978-1851098736.
  9. ↑ Brook, Kevin A.. The Jews of Khazaria (2018)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 978-1-5381-0342-5.
  10. ↑ Renan, Ernest. Le judaïsme comme race et comme religion ; conférence faite au cercle Saint-Simon, le 27 janvier 1883 (1883)Calmann Lévy. p. 23. Retrieved 2025-08-29.
  11. ↑ Curta, Florin. Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages (500-1300) 1 (2019)Brill. p. 128.
  12. ↑ Rossman, Vadim Joseph. Lev Gumilev, Eurasianism and Khazaria. East European Jewish Affairs 32 (1) (2002). p. 30–51. doi:10.1080/13501670208577962.
  13. ↑ Mogilner, Marina. A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness (2022)Harvard University Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-674-27072-5.
  14. ↑ Simon, Louis. Die Juden in Russland (1844)Hoffmann und Campe Verlag. p. 11-12.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Singerman, Robert (2004). Contemporary Racist and Judeophobic Ideology Discovers the Khazars, or, Who Really Are the Jews?. https://www.academia.edu/5289705. Retrieved 1 March 2014. 
  16. ↑ Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories Abound Around Russian Assault on Ukraine | ADL (in en). Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Retrieved 2022-12-07.
  17. ↑ Khazars | #TranslateHate | AJC (in en). American Jewish Committee (AJC) (2021-03-30). Retrieved 2022-12-07.
  18. ↑ Khazars | Center on Extremism (in en). Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Retrieved 2022-12-07.
  19. ↑ Pound & Zukofsky 1987, p. xxi, citing letters of 10 July 1938 and 24/25 September 1955. Ahearn speculates that [Ezra] Pound may have thought:'If there were no such people as Jews, then the problem of indiscriminate anti-Semitism would disappear. On could focus one’s attention on usurers of whatever description.'
  20. ↑ Gardell 2002, p. 165.'The formative period of Christian Identity could roughly be said to be the three decades between 1940 and 1970. Through missionaries like Wesley Swift, Bertrand Comparet and William Potter Gale, it took on a white racialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and far-right conservative political outlook. Combined with the teachings of early disciples Richard G. Butler, Colonel Jack Mohr and James K. Warner, a distinctly racist theology was gradually formed. Whites were said to be the Adamic people, created in His likeness. ... Blacks ... were not the chief target of fear and hatred. This position was reserved for Jews. The latent anti-Semitism found in British-Israelism rose to prominence. Jews were, at best, reduced to mongrelized imposters, not infrequently identified with Eurasian Khazars without any legitimate claim to a closeness with God, and at worst denounced as the offspring of Satan.'
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Harkabi, Yehoshafat. The Persisting Question: Sociological Perspectives and Social Contexts of Modern Antisemitism (1987)Walter de Gruyter. p. 412–427. ISBN 978-3-11-010170-6.
  22. ↑ Schnirelman, Victor A.. The story of a euphemism: The Khazars in Russian Nationalist Literature 353-372. Handbook of Oriental Studies 17 (2007a)Brill. p. 353–372. ISBN 978-90-04-16042-2.
  23. ↑ Rossman, Vadim Joseph. Russia Between East and West: Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism (2007)Brill. ISBN 978-9-004-15415-5.
  24. ↑
  25. ↑ Réthelyi, Mari. Hungarian Jewish Stories of Origin: Samuel Kohn, the Khazar Connection and the Conquest of Hungary (in en). Hungarian Cultural Studies: e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association 14 (2021). p. 54-55, 57-61. doi:10.5195/ahea.2021.427.
  26. ↑ Loeb, Isidore. Jews and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880-1940 (2011)Brandeis University Press. p. 16–17. ISBN 9781584657170. doi:10.2307/j.ctv102bhs1.7.
  27. ↑ Drachman, Bernard (September 16, 1904). "Racial and Religious Elements in Judaism" (in en). The Hebrew Standard (New York) 45 (57): 12. https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/hebstd/1904/09/16/01/page/12/. Retrieved 26 October 2025. [dead link]
  28. ↑ Baron, Salo Wittmayer. A Social and Religious History of the Jews 3 (1957)Columbia University Press. p. 206.
  29. ↑ Roth, Cecil. A Short History of the Jewish People (1959)Horovitz. p. 288.
  30. ↑ Eban, Abba. My People: The Story of the Jews (1968)Behrman House. p. 150.
  31. ↑ Ankori, Zvi. Genetic Diseases among Ashkenazi Jews (1979)Raven Press. p. 37. ISBN 9780890042625.
  32. ↑ Miller, Rory. The British Mandate in Palestine (2020)Routledge. ISBN 9780429026034.
  33. ↑ Bartal, Israel. The Cambridge History of Judaism 7: The Early Modern Jewish History, 1500–1815 (2017)Cambridge University Press. p. 228. ISBN 9780521889049.
  34. ↑ Alhadeff, Vic (July 23, 1993). "Scholar critical of Khazar theory". The Australian Jewish News (Sydney Edition): 5. https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/ajns/1993/07/23/01/article/37/. Retrieved 26 October 2025. [dead link]
  35. ↑ Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews. Genome Biology and Evolution 8 (7) (August 2016). p. 2259–65. doi:10.1093/gbe/evw162.
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 Rubin, Rita (May 7, 2013). "'Jews a Race' Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert". Forward. http://forward.com/news/israel/175912/jews-a-race-genetic-theory-comes-under-fierce-atta/?p=all. Retrieved 13 August 2025. 
  37. ↑ Wald, James. Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: The Dynamics of Delegitimization (2019)Indiana University Press. p. 18.
  38. ↑ Waldman, Shamam. Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century. Cell 185 (25) (November 30, 2022). p. 4703–4716.e16. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2022.11.002.
  39. ↑ Waldman, Shamam. Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century. Cell 185 (25) (November 30, 2022). p. Supplemental Data S1, p. 26. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2022.11.002.
  40. ↑ Brook, Kevin A.. The Maternal Genetic Lineages of Ashkenazic Jews (2022)Academic Studies Press. p. 85–86. ISBN 978-1644699843. doi:10.2307/j.ctv33mgbcn.
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