For the unfamiliar, the "Khazar hypothesis" is that Ashkenazic Jews are not Semitic, but are primarily descended from the Turkic people, the Khazars, who ruled the Khazar Khanate for approximately 200 years in what is today's eastern Ukraine and southeastern Russia. A khan converted and, depending on how true the legend is, got his people to all convert.
It surely isn't all true. From Constantine in Rome to Grand Duke Vytautis in Lithuania, the last pagan country of Europe, the populace didn't convert overnight after the sovereign did. But, more and more people would have eventually converted it.
Novelist Arthur Koestler first broached it in modern times. His idea was to show that many Jews weren't "Jews" in hopes of stopping Hitler's persecution. But, Hitler was persecuting on both racial and cultural-religious grounds, first, and second, might have considered Khazars to be untermenschen from the East anyway.
That said, was Koestler right? Are some modern Jews who raise similar ideas right?
Survey says: Yes, largely. The author says that East European Jews probably have some Alan background before the Khazars, but that, otherwise — as indicted by DNA! — a West Asian background for Ashkenazic Jews stands up. Sorry, Zionists.
In an earlier piece, Eran Elhaik discusses the origins of Yiddish. He says that it originated as an Ashkenazi trade language, and ties this to the rise of the Khanate. He said it grew to control Silk Road traffic.
I have a partial problem with that one, though.
Control it to where? Kievan Rus grew in power on the corpse of the Khanate, so it wasn't around to get Silk Road trade. Further west, after the brief Carolignian florescence, further Europe was in the throes of the Dark Ages. And, the Abbasids would have used trade routes running south of the Caspian. Middlemanning trade between China and the Byzantines might have happened, I suppose.
The second partial problem is that genes aren't language, which Elhalk kind of acknowledges in his first piece, thereby undercutting his second. Why don't we have a "Yiddish" more influenced by Khazar words than the real McCoy is? To me, it seems likely that there was back-and-forth pollination between various groups of Eastern European Jews, some of who were in today's Poland at the rise of the Khanate, but without any organized nation state.
That said, Elhaik is, like Shlomo Sand, himself Jewish, so nobody can honestly play the anti-Semitic card against him. And let's introduce that second name.
Or, his book.
The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo SandMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Per the editorial blurb, this is a historical tour de force indeed.
The introduction tells Sand’s story and reason for writing. Noting that multiple women wanting to do aliyah were told no because of non-Jewish mothers, I thought that this issue itself could be a full chapter.
Around 150, he talks about Maccabean forcible conversion. I knew it well re the Idumeans, like Herod’s ancestors. Forgot about the Samaritans, and in grokking Josephus, don’t think I’d read about the Itureans in Galilee.
In conjunction, he notes something I already knew in part: That the revolt was purely religious freedom related, and not anti-Hellenism. After all, by John Hyrcanus, Maccabees are using Greek names.
He also notes Hanukkah was originally pagan. And he’s right! And, this explains why it was relatively “low” in Jewish life until modern times. It was too Messianic. See here for more. Yet more here. (Update: See LOTS more at this longform for just what Daniel, First Maccabees and to some extent Second Maccabees, presumably willfully and polemically, get wrong.)
He’s good on describing Judaism’s expansion by evangelism in the eastern Mediterranean, then Rome itself, then down to late classical antiquity Yemen. He also offers plausible reasons why Jews in Palestine declined after the Islamic conquest, including the tax-free Muslim advantage, plus Islam being more congenial than Christianity. (Besides hating Byzantium and “orthodox” Christianity, it’s arguable that Jacobites, if they took the “two persons as well as two natures” far enough, could see Jesus in a quasi-Ebionite way and convert to Islam as well.) He notes that pre-statehood Zionists in 20th century Palestine even presumed that the Palestinians were ethnic kin.
Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv Univ. used philology to conclude that most (now former) Spanish Sephardim were of Berber origin, or Arab-Berber, and not Jewish by ethnos.
Next, he goes to the Khazar Khanate. He does NOT just recapitulate Koestler. First, he notes that both Jewish and Russian historians in the first half of the 20th century did sound work on the Khanate history. In short, it lasted long enough that Judaism surely became the religion of at least a fair chunk of the masses, not just the rulers. Second, at least one subtribe can be clearly shown to have migrated with the Magyars when they left the Khanate and headed to the Hungarian plain.
He also goes beyond (from what I remember) of Koestler to pull in linguistics and philology. Everybody knows that Yiddish is a Germanic language, but one with a number of Slavic words and a few Hebrew ones. Not everybody knows that it also has a number of Turkic words, including the word “to pray.” Oops. (For the anti-Khazar Zionists, that is.) It’s things like this, given that the work on the history side by Abraham Polok is pre-WWII, at least in his earlier work, that has historians like Tony Judt saying the book has little new for the academic.
Related, Sand notes that the number of Rhineland German Jews simply wasn’t great enough to have caused the mass of Eastern European Jewry. Conclusion? Some version of the “Khazar hypothesis” is surely true.
From this, Sand does some speculating on the origins and development of the Yiddish language.
He then goes beyond Koestler in one other way, since such things didn’t exist in the 1970s. He addresses DNA testing, and not just that narrowly and specifically related to the Khazar theory. He notes that DNA testing is still in its infancy, that because it offers inconclusive results in many cases it can be (and is) “spun,” and this:
“Like similar investigations carried out by Macedonian racists, Lebanese Phalangists, Lapps in northern Scandinavia, and so on, such Jewish-Israeli research cannot be entirely free from crude and dangerous racism.”
Earlier, he notes the irony of descendants of Jews who suffered brutally from the race-essentialist ideas of the Nazis now engaging in race-essentialism themselves. He adds that some early Zionists supported eugenic ideas.
He also notes that words like “Sephardi” and above all “Ashkhenazi” are cultural, ultimately religious (and linguistic, I would add) markers, not ethnic ones.
Sand wraps his last chapter by noting the development of “Israeli identity” in the new state, and Ben-Gurion engaging in a mix of apparent surrender to and actual manipulation of the rabbinate. The flip side, he says, is many Zionists refusing to talk about an Israeli people. That may be in part because an Ashkenazi Eastern European culture has not been forcible on other Israeli Jews.
He concludes with a brief response to his critics.
One thing is missing from this book. It’s not huge, but it’s not minuscule, either. Based on his introductory passage about matrilineality, and on things from the Christian New Testament, and other evidence from that time about how this wasn’t always the case, it would have been nice for Sand to spend, oh, half a dozen pages more directly on this issue, especially with the rise of genetic testing.
Sand’s original conclusion, that Israel as we know today cannot stand with its current citizenship definition as the Arab population inside its 1948 boundaries grows, seems too wishful today. Only time will tell.
Why is this book so controversial? In part, from being translated into the language in which I read it, as well as French. Being published in Hebrew, it made only a modest stir inside Israel. But, when translated, Zionists could see a cat being let out of the bag.
Related? I rarely do this, but most one-star reviewers have to be critiqued. They basically fall into two camps. One, on the Khazar issue, claim this is nothing but a repeat of Koestler. LIE.
Another claims that he never talks about the Jewish people. (He notes people raised Jewish, who converted to Christianity, then applied for Israeli citizenship based on Israeli nationality and were denied, with Israel’s supreme court saying a “Jewish nationality” existed but an “Israeli nationality” did not.) Given what I have shown he does in the first chapter, talking about “people” vs “nation” and his recap at the end, this too is a LIE.
LIE is the only word that can be used.
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