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<p>[QUOTE="DonnaML, post: 4590716, member: 110350"]This thread involves the intersection of my two primary pastimes: the study of Jewish history and genealogy (including genetic genealogy), and the study and collection of coins and antiquities. I've been reluctant to participate in this thread because -- even though my knowledge of the Khazars is limited to the first of those two fields -- it's a controversial topic (to say the least), and I could write about it for hours, if I included citations.</p><p><br /></p><p>So I'll limit myself to some basic observations.</p><p><br /></p><p>First, nobody should rely for anything on Koestler's book. I'm afraid that my inclination is to completely disregard any work that even cites it. As much as I admire <i>Darkness At Noon</i> and his book <i>Scum of the Earth</i> about his experiences in France in 1940, Arthur Koestler was not a historian. His ulterior motive in writing the book in the 1950s, and thereby reviving the old Khazar story, was his idea that if he could establish that the Ashkenazi Jews of the 20th century were descended from the Khazars, and were not connected historically or by descent to the Jews living in the Holy Land at the time of the Christian Bible, what he saw as the basis of anti-Semitism (the Christ-killer accusation) would disappear, and nobody would hate the Jews anymore. His purpose was noble, but in fact he did nothing to end anti-Semitism; all he accomplished was to give hardline anti-Zionists like Shlomo Sand (not an expert on Jewish history himself) another supposed basis for denying the existence of a connection between the Jews of Israel and the Land of Israel. And that's all I'll say about the political aspects of this subject.</p><p><br /></p><p>Second, the contention that the Ashkenazi Jews (primarily the Jews of Eastern Europe but also the Jews of Germany, Alsace, etc.) are descended in whole or in part from the Khazars has been repeatedly and convincingly refuted on multiple occasions. (I have a long list of articles and studies comprising such refutations saved to my hard drive!) There is absolutely zero evidence -- whether genetic, historical, archaeological, onomastic, or linguistic -- to support it.</p><p><br /></p><p>As a fundamental historical matter, the notion that any substantial group of Turkic people (and although not much is known about the Khazars' language or ethnicity, there is general agreement from what is known that that's what they were) could have somehow migrated west to and through Eastern and Central Europe from the land of the Khazars in the 800s or 900s without leaving a trace, or anybody taking notice of their presence, is ludicrous to begin with, genetics aside. Especially given that there were <u>already</u> Jewish communities in Northern France, the Rhineland, and today's Czech lands -- i.e., the future Ashkenazi Jews -- <u>before</u> the fall of the Khazar kingdom and the supposed subsequent migrations. And given that the vernacular languages those communities spoke did not have one single word of Turkic origin in them; nor did Western Yiddish (or, later, Eastern Yiddish), to which those vernacular languages were the percursor. There is precisely one geneticist working today who continues to try to prove the Khazar theory of Ashkenazi descent; I won't dignify him by naming him, but I can provide citations to various refutations of his arguments to anyone interested. (One of his many errors -- essentially, a sleight of hand -- is to use today's Kurds, Armenians, etc. as a proxy for the Khazars, assuming without any basis that they are the Khazars' descendants, and then trying to establish a genetic connection between Ashkenazi Jews and Kurds, Armenians, etc., as his evidence that the Ashkenazim are descended from the Khazars.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Third, there is serious doubt among many scholars that the underlying conversion of the Khazars to Judaism ever occurred in the first place. Even the proponents of the historicity of that conversion concede that it applied, at most, to the royal family and aristocracy, and not to the population in general. But, to the best of my knowledge, there is no archaeological evidence for <u>any</u> conversion; the royal and wealthy graves of Khazars that have been excavated bear no trace of Judaic practices or objects. It has also been argued that the correspondence between the King of the Khazars and established Jewish communities (for which the originals, if any, no longer exist), often cited as the most conclusive evidence of the conversion, were a fictional construct. If anyone has access to academic articles, the best presentation of the "anti-conversion" arguments is in a 2013 article by Shaul Stampfer, a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, available at <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/547127" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/547127" rel="nofollow">https://muse.jhu.edu/article/547127</a>. You can also listen to the hour-long audio of his 2017 lecture on the Khazars at YIVO; see <a href="https://yivo.org/The-Myth-of-the-Khazar-Conversion" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://yivo.org/The-Myth-of-the-Khazar-Conversion" rel="nofollow">https://yivo.org/The-Myth-of-the-Khazar-Conversion</a> . His arguments seem persuasive to me, but it doesn't really matter much one way or the other whether he's correct, since even if the conversion did take place, there's no evidence of any historical or genetic connection between Ashkenazi Jewry and any Jewish Khazars.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="DonnaML, post: 4590716, member: 110350"]This thread involves the intersection of my two primary pastimes: the study of Jewish history and genealogy (including genetic genealogy), and the study and collection of coins and antiquities. I've been reluctant to participate in this thread because -- even though my knowledge of the Khazars is limited to the first of those two fields -- it's a controversial topic (to say the least), and I could write about it for hours, if I included citations. So I'll limit myself to some basic observations. First, nobody should rely for anything on Koestler's book. I'm afraid that my inclination is to completely disregard any work that even cites it. As much as I admire [I]Darkness At Noon[/I] and his book [I]Scum of the Earth[/I] about his experiences in France in 1940, Arthur Koestler was not a historian. His ulterior motive in writing the book in the 1950s, and thereby reviving the old Khazar story, was his idea that if he could establish that the Ashkenazi Jews of the 20th century were descended from the Khazars, and were not connected historically or by descent to the Jews living in the Holy Land at the time of the Christian Bible, what he saw as the basis of anti-Semitism (the Christ-killer accusation) would disappear, and nobody would hate the Jews anymore. His purpose was noble, but in fact he did nothing to end anti-Semitism; all he accomplished was to give hardline anti-Zionists like Shlomo Sand (not an expert on Jewish history himself) another supposed basis for denying the existence of a connection between the Jews of Israel and the Land of Israel. And that's all I'll say about the political aspects of this subject. Second, the contention that the Ashkenazi Jews (primarily the Jews of Eastern Europe but also the Jews of Germany, Alsace, etc.) are descended in whole or in part from the Khazars has been repeatedly and convincingly refuted on multiple occasions. (I have a long list of articles and studies comprising such refutations saved to my hard drive!) There is absolutely zero evidence -- whether genetic, historical, archaeological, onomastic, or linguistic -- to support it. As a fundamental historical matter, the notion that any substantial group of Turkic people (and although not much is known about the Khazars' language or ethnicity, there is general agreement from what is known that that's what they were) could have somehow migrated west to and through Eastern and Central Europe from the land of the Khazars in the 800s or 900s without leaving a trace, or anybody taking notice of their presence, is ludicrous to begin with, genetics aside. Especially given that there were [U]already[/U] Jewish communities in Northern France, the Rhineland, and today's Czech lands -- i.e., the future Ashkenazi Jews -- [U]before[/U] the fall of the Khazar kingdom and the supposed subsequent migrations. And given that the vernacular languages those communities spoke did not have one single word of Turkic origin in them; nor did Western Yiddish (or, later, Eastern Yiddish), to which those vernacular languages were the percursor. There is precisely one geneticist working today who continues to try to prove the Khazar theory of Ashkenazi descent; I won't dignify him by naming him, but I can provide citations to various refutations of his arguments to anyone interested. (One of his many errors -- essentially, a sleight of hand -- is to use today's Kurds, Armenians, etc. as a proxy for the Khazars, assuming without any basis that they are the Khazars' descendants, and then trying to establish a genetic connection between Ashkenazi Jews and Kurds, Armenians, etc., as his evidence that the Ashkenazim are descended from the Khazars.) Third, there is serious doubt among many scholars that the underlying conversion of the Khazars to Judaism ever occurred in the first place. Even the proponents of the historicity of that conversion concede that it applied, at most, to the royal family and aristocracy, and not to the population in general. But, to the best of my knowledge, there is no archaeological evidence for [U]any[/U] conversion; the royal and wealthy graves of Khazars that have been excavated bear no trace of Judaic practices or objects. It has also been argued that the correspondence between the King of the Khazars and established Jewish communities (for which the originals, if any, no longer exist), often cited as the most conclusive evidence of the conversion, were a fictional construct. If anyone has access to academic articles, the best presentation of the "anti-conversion" arguments is in a 2013 article by Shaul Stampfer, a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, available at [URL]https://muse.jhu.edu/article/547127[/URL]. You can also listen to the hour-long audio of his 2017 lecture on the Khazars at YIVO; see [URL]https://yivo.org/The-Myth-of-the-Khazar-Conversion[/URL] . His arguments seem persuasive to me, but it doesn't really matter much one way or the other whether he's correct, since even if the conversion did take place, there's no evidence of any historical or genetic connection between Ashkenazi Jewry and any Jewish Khazars.[/QUOTE]
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