Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry

The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, often called by its critics the "Khazar myth", is the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars - a multi-ethnic conglomerate of Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic Khanate in the area extending from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. The hypothesis relies on some Medieval sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which at some point in the 8th-9th centuries, the ruling elite of the Khazars was said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism. The scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain, and the evidence used to tie the Ashkenazi communities to the Khazars is exiguous and subject to conflicting interpretations.

In the late 19th century, Ernest Renan and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe originated among Turkic refugees who had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into the Rhineland, and exchanged their native Khazar language for the Yiddish language while continuing to practice Judaism. The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976. This hypothesis has had a complex history within academia. Some scholars still defend its plausibility, but most dismiss it as a fantasy. Genetic studies of Jewish origins have found no substantial evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews, as opposed to evidence they have a Levantine origin admixed with Southern European. According to science writer Jon Entine, modern geneticists and historians now largely see the Khazar hypothesis as a myth. According to the historian Bernard Spolsky and the Yiddish scholar Alexander Beider, the whole issue of genetics itself regarding these origins remains uncertain. The hypothesis has also been used by a number of antisemites and anti-Zionists to disprove Ashkenazi Jews have an ancestral connection to the land of Israel.

One key proponent of the hypothesis is Eran Elhaik, who in 2012 conducted a study aiming to vindicate it. In 2016 he attempted to reground the hypothesis by combining the results of a novel method of genetic analysis that he created with the linguistic theories of Paul Wexler, another supporter of the theory, whose work on the Yiddish language is fringe in the field. Elhaik called more mainstream geneticists who have criticized his work “liars” and “frauds.”

History

Christian commentators have long been concerned with the fate of the ten lost tribes. Prester John placed them somewhere in Inner Asia. Matthew Paris speculated that the Tartars could be from the ten lost tribes. However, Christian commentators and polemicists described the Khazars as a people without a known faith.

Some sources attribute to the Ukrainian Rabbi Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788 -1860) the first reference to a connection between the Ashkenazi Jews and the Khazars. Levinsohn also recorded that the tradition of their forefathers was that Ashkenazi Jews had earlier spoken Russian before acquiring their Ashkenazi language. The hypothesis was advanced in 1808 by Johann Ewers, in the context of an early controversy over the foundations of the Russian state, which pitted scholars espousing a Norman origin for the Varangians against those who argued that these founders of the Kievan Rus' were Slavic and indigenous. Ewers proposed the idea that the Viking/Varangian founders were in fact Khazars. The Russian historian Nikolay Karamzin advanced the claim, asserting that considerable numbers of Khazars had left Khazaria for Kievan Rus' in the time of Vladimir 1 (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, alternatively proclaimed that the members of his Turkic-speaking sect were descended from Turkic converts to Judaism. This hypothesis, that the descendents of Khazar converts to Judaism formed a major proportion of Ashkenazim, was first proposed to a Western public by Ernest Renan 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.

Occasional suggestions emerged that there was a small Khazar component in East European Jews in works by Joseph Jacobs (1886), Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (1893), Maksymilian Ernest Gumplowicz, and by the Russian-Jewish anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg.

Leroy-Beaulieu, a critic of anti-Semitism who perhaps drew on Renan, queried whether or not thousands of Polish and Russian Jews might have their origins traced back to the "old nomads of the steppes."

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 introduced the notion to an American audience in 1911 in his book, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.

When at the Versailles Peace Conference, a Jewish Zionist called Palestine the land of the Jewish people's ancestors, Joseph Reinach, a French Jewish 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 descend from the Khazars, a Tatar people from the south of Russia who converted to Judaism in mass at the time of Charlemagne."

The idea was also taken up by the Polish-Jewish economic historian and General Zionist Yitzhak Schipper in 1918, by scholarly anthropologists, such as Roland B. Dixon (1923), and by writers like H. G. Wells (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 wrote to Max Eitingon that the sculptor Oscar Nemon, for whom he was sitting, showed the lineaments of a "Slavic Eastern Jew, Khazar or Kalmuck or something like that".

In 1932, Samuel Krauss ventured the theory that the biblical Ashkenaz referred to northern Asia Minor, and he identified it with the Khazars, a position immediately disputed by Jacob Mann. Ten years later, in 1942, Abraham N. Poliak, later professor of the history of the Middle Ages at Tel Aviv University, published a Hebrew monograph in which he concluded that the East European Jews came from Khazaria. 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, while assuming the Jews of Western Europe resulted from a "panmixia" in the first millennium, asserted in 1955 that it was widely assumed that Europe's Eastern Jews descended from a mixture of Khazarian and German Jews. Poliak's work found some support from Salo Wittmayer Baron and Ben-Zion Dinur, but was dismissed by Bernard Weinryb as a fiction (1962).

Salo Wittmayer Baron

Salo Wittmayer Baron, 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 Asia Minor, between Byzantium, Sassanid Persia, and the Abbasid and Ummayad Caliphates.

For Baron, the fact of Jewish Khazaria played a lively role in stirring up among Western Jews an image of "red Jews", and among Jews in Islamic countries a beacon of hope. After the dissolution of Khazaria, Baron sees a diaspora drifting both north into Russia, Poland and the Ukraine, and westwards into Pannonia and the Balkan lands. where their cultivated presence both established Jewish communities and paved the way, ironically, for the Slavonic conversion to Christianity. By the 11th and 12th centuries, these Eastern Jews make their first appearance in the Jewish literature of France and Germany. Maimonides, 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.

Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. and contemporary views

The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976. Koestler's work was both positively and negatively reviewed. Israel’s ambassador to Britain branded the book "an anti-Semitic action financed by the Palestinians", while Bernard Lewis 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. Koestler argued that this theory would mitigate European racially-based antisemitism.

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) and population genetics (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.

Use in antisemitic polemics

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, in both Britain and the United States. Particularly after the publication of Burton J. Hendrick ‘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; antisemitic conspiracy theorists like the Ku Klux Klan’s Hiram Wesley Evans; and anti-communist polemicists like John O. Beaty

In 1938, Ezra Pound, then strongly identifying with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, sent a query to fellow poet Louis Zukofsky concerning the Khazars after someone had written to him 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 convert from Rabbinical Judaism Benjamin H. Freedman was a rambling anti-Semitic tirade written to Dr. David Goldstein after the latter converted to Catholicism.

John O. Beaty was an antisemitic, McCarthyite professor of Old English 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 1. 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. The British author Douglas Reed 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 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 Christian Identity movement has associated two verses from the New Testament, Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 with the Khazars. The Jews are literally satanic in Identity theology Jeffrey Kaplan calls these two passages the corner stone of Identity theology. Texts by Jewish authors such as the Babylonian Talmud and Arthur Koestler’s work are raised almost to the level of Holy Writ.

Soviet Union and Russia

The theory was prominent in Soviet antisemitism, gaining a place in Soviet historiography. The theory influenced Soviet historians including Boris Rybakov, Mikhail Artamonov and Lev Gumilyov and was used to support soviet political theory. 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. Jews, he regarded as a parasitic, international urban class. The Jews had dominated the Khazars creating a chimera, subjecting Rus’ to the "Khazar Yoke."

Since the 1970s the Khazars euphemism has been part of the Russian nationalist lexicon. Vadim V. Kozhinov theorized that the Khazar Yoke was more dangerous to Rus’ then the Tatar Yoke. The Khazars were imagined as a persistent danger to Rus’. After the fall of the Soviet Union the theory maintained a role in Russian antisemitism. Contemporary Russian anti-Semites continue to perpetuate the Khazar myth. Gumilyov and his students work remain popular in Russia. “Khazars” and “ethnic chimera” have become preferred terms for antisemitic Russian chauvinists.

Arab

The British politicians John Hope Simpson and Edward Spears argued that Jewish immigrants to Mandatory Palestine where the descendants of pagan converts and not the Israelites.

In anti-Zionist argumentation delivered at the UN during 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. Internal British documents seem to support the claim. It would play a role in Arab anti-Zionist polemics, taking on an antisemitic edge. Bernard Lewis, noting in 1987 that serious Arab scholars had dropped it, remarked that it only occasionally emerged in Arab political polemics.

Cults

Aum Shinrikyo is a Japanese doomsday cult. The cult was active in Japan and Russia, with an estimated 10,000 and 30,000 followers respectively. The groups “Manual of Fear” used the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in addition to other anti-Semitic 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 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.

Genetics and the Khazar theory

See also: Genetic studies of Jewish origins

Raphael Patai (1989) describes the Khazars in racial terms as being a Turkic people with some Mongoloid admixture. After major advances in DNA sequence analysis and computing technology in the late 20th and early 21st century, a plethora of genetic research on Jewish and other human populations has been conducted worldwide. 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, a few studies authored in this period diverge from the majority view in favor of the Khazar theory.

A 2003 study of the Y chromosome by Behar et al. pointed to multiple origins for Ashkenazi Levites, a priestly class who comprise approximately 4% of Ashkenazi Jews. It found that haplogroup R1a1a (R-M17), which is uncommon in the Middle East or among Sephardi Jews, but dominant in Eastern Europe, is present in over 50% of Ashkenazi Levites, while the rest of Ashkenazi Levites' paternal lineage is of apparent Middle Eastern origin. In comparison, the haplotype is very rare among Ashkenazi Cohanim (1.7%). Behar suggested a founding event, probably involving one or very few European men, occurring at a time close to the initial formation and settlement of the Ashkenazi community as a possible explanation.

It has been suggested that subjects of the Khazar Empire (located to the northeast of the Black Sea), who had adopted Judaism in the last quarter of the first millennium c.e., were an important constituent of the nascent Ashkenazi community. If a European origin for the Ashkenazi Levite haplogroup R1a1 component is accepted as a reasonable possibility, it is of interest to speculate further on the possible timing, location, and mechanism of this event. Because the modal haplotype of haplogroup R1a1 found in the Ashkenazi Levites is found at reasonably high frequency throughout the eastern European region, it is not possible to use genetic information to pinpoint the exact origin of any putative founder from the currently available data sets. Intriguingly, the Sorbian tongue, relexified with a German vocabulary, has been proposed as the origin of Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazim, but there has been no suggestion of an association between Ashkenazi Levites in particular and the Sorbian language. One attractive source would be the Khazarian Kingdom, whose ruling class is thought to have converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century, This kingdom flourished between the years 700 c.e. and 1016 c.e. It extended from northern Georgia in the south to Bulgar on the Volga River in the north and from the Aral Sea in the east to the Dnieper River in the west—an area that falls within a region in which haplogroup R1a1 NRYs are found at high frequency. . . Although neither the NRY haplogroup composition of the majority of Ashkenazi Jews nor the microsatellite haplotype composition of the R1a1 haplogroup within Ashkenazi Levites is consistent with a major Khazar or other European origin, as has been speculated by some authors, one cannot rule out the important contribution of a single or a few founders among contemporary Ashkenazi Levites.'

Nebel, Behar and Goldstein speculate that this may indicate a Khazar origin, with Goldstein saying the Khazar theory "now seems to me plausible, if not likely".

A 2013 study by Rootsi et al. found that R1a-M582, the specific subclade of R1a to which all sampled Ashkenazi Levites with R1a belonged, was completely absent of a sample of 922 Eastern Europeans and was only found in one of the 2,164 samples from the Caucasus, while it made up 33.8% of non-Levite Ashkenazi R1a and was also found in 5.9% of Near Easterners bearing R1a. The clade, though less represented in Near Easterners, was more diverse among them than among Ashkenazi Jews. Rootsi et al. argued this supports a Near Eastern Hebrew origin for the paternal lineage R1a present among Ashkenazi Levites: R1a-M582 was also found among different Iranian populations, among Kurds from Cilician Anatolia and Kazakhstan, and among non-Ashkenazi Jews.

"Previous Y-chromosome studies have demonstrated that Ashkenazi Levites, members of a paternally inherited Jewish priestly caste, display a distinctive founder event within R1a, the most prevalent Y-chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europe. Here we report the analysis of 16 whole R1 sequences and show that a set of 19 unique nucleotide substitutions defines the Ashkenazi R1a lineage. While our survey of one of these, M582, in 2,834 R1a samples reveals its absence in 922 Eastern Europeans, we show it is present in all sampled R1a Ashkenazi Levites, as well as in 33.8% of other R1a Ashkenazi Jewish males and 5.9% of 303 R1a Near Eastern males, where it shows considerably higher diversity. Moreover, the M582 lineage also occurs at low frequencies in non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations. In contrast to the previously suggested Eastern European origin for Ashkenazi Levites, the current data are indicative of a geographic source of the Levite founder lineage in the Near East and its likely presence among pre-Diaspora Hebrews."

Geneticist Eran Elhaik has argued, in two separate papers, the first in 2012 and the latest (2016) co-authored by Wexler, that his genetic analysis strengthens the Khazar hypothesis. Of the 2012 study Elhaik writes: "Strong evidence for the Khazarian hypothesis is the clustering of European Jews with the populations that reside on opposite ends of ancient Khazaria: Armenians, Georgians, and Azerbaijani Jews. 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 the 2016 study Wexler, Elhaik, 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. Elhaik and Wexler proposed a variant to the canonical Khazarian hypothesis whereas Iranians, Greeks, Turkish, and Slavs converted to Judaism in Turkey prior to migrating to Khazaria where a small scale conversion took place.

Criticism

According to Jon Entine, historians and scientists believe the Khazarian theory should more accurately be called a myth. A 2013 study of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA found no significant evidence of Khazar contribution to the Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, as would be predicted by the Khazar hypothesis and although there is no historical or DNA evidence to support the Khazar idea, Alan Unterman maintains that it is still popular in some Arab states.

The strong claim that Ashkenazis as a whole take their origin from Khazars has been widely criticized as there is no direct evidence to support it.

Using four Jewish groups, one being Ashkenazi, a Kopelman et al study found no direct evidence to the Khazar theory while another research concluded that its findings "debunk one of the most questionable, but still tenacious, hypotheses: that most Ashkenazi Jews can trace their roots to the mysterious Khazar Kingdom that flourished during the ninth century in the region between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire". Some scientists believe that even if the theory were to be true, "only a small minority of the Khazars may have adopted Judaism." and that "the questions of whether there was a Khazar contribution to the Ashkenazi Jews' lineage, or exactly what percentage of mitochondrial variants emanate from Europe, cannot be answered with certainty using present genetic and geographical data".

Nadine Epstein, an editor and executive publisher of Moment magazine said "When I read Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe, I bought his theory that Ashkenazim were descended from the Khazars ... But in 1997, Karl Skorecki in Haifa, Michael Hammer in Tucson and several London researchers surprised everyone by finding evidence of the Jewish priestly line of males, the Kohanim. Half of Ashkenazic men and slightly more than half of Sephardic men who claimed to be Kohanim were found to have a distinctive set of genetic markers on their Y chromosome, making it highly possible that they are descendants of a single male or group of related males who lived between 1180 and 650 B.C.E., about the time of Moses and Aaron.

In 2000, the analysis of a report by Nicholas Wade named Y Chromosome Bears Witness to Story of the Jewish Diaspora "provided genetic witness that these [Jewish] communities have, to a remarkable extent, retained their biological identity separate from their host populations, evidence of relatively little intermarriage or conversion into Judaism over the centuries.... The results accord with Jewish history and tradition and refute theories like those holding that Jewish communities consist mostly of converts from other faiths, or that they are descended from the Khazars, a medieval Turkish tribe that adopted Judaism."

In June 2014, Shaul Stampfer published a lengthy paper challenging the theory as ungrounded in sources contemporary with the Khazar period, stating: "Such a conversion, even though it’s a wonderful story, never happened".

Elhaik's 2012 study was criticized for its use of Armenians and Azerbaijani Jews as proxies for Khazars and for using Beduin and Jordanian Hashemites 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. The decision to cast Bedouin/Hashemites as "proto-Jews" was especially seen as political in nature, considering that both have origins in Arab tribes from the Arabian Peninsula rather than from the Ancient Israelites, while the descent of the Jews from the Israelites is largely accepted. The study was also criticized as interpreting information selectively—The study found far more genetic similarity between the Druze and Ashkenazim than the Ashkenazim and Armenians, but Elhaik rejected this as indicating a common Semitic origin, instead interpreting it as evidence of Druze having Turkic origins when they are known to come from Syria.

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." Marcus Feldman, director of Stanford University'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."

Elhaik and Wexler's 2016 study was challenged by two prominent scholars of Jewish demography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shaul Stampfer, a professor of Soviet and East European Jewry, deemed it “basically nonsense.” Sergio DellaPergola, the primary demographer of the Jewish people at the university, called it a "falsification", criticizing its methodology, using a small population size and selectively removing population groups that refuted the findings they wanted, namely other Jewish groups such as the Italkim and Sephardic Jews, to whom Ashkenazi Jews are closely related genetically. “Serious research would have factored in the glaring genetic similarity between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, which mean Polish Jews are more genetically similar to Iraqi Jews than to a non-Jewish Pole.” Elhaik replied that “studying the DNA of non-Ashkenazic Jews would not change the DNA of Ashkenazic Jews nor the predicted origin of their DNA.'

See also

• Conversion to Judaism
• Eurasian nomads
• Genetic history of Europe
• Genetic history of the Turkish people
• Genetic studies of Jewish origins
• Genetic studies on Jews
• Japanese-Jewish common ancestry theory
• Japhetic theory
• Jewish ethnic divisions
• Jewish history
• Khazar theory
• Kuzari
• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
• Rus' Khaganate
• Sun Language Theory
• Theory of Kashmiri descent from lost tribes of Israel
• Theory of Pashtun descent from Israelites
• Timeline of the Turkic peoples (500–1300)
• Turanism
• Turkic migration
• Turkic peoples
• Turkish Jews

External links

• Kutschera, Hugo, Freiherr von, (1909): Die Chasaren; historische Studie
• Fishberg, Maurice (1911): The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.
• The Kievan Letter scan in the Cambridge University Library 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
• The Kitab al-Khazari of Judah Hallevi, full English translation at sacred-texts.com
• Ancient lost capital of the Khazar kingdom found