I must stress at the outset that I have not read the book, nor have I engaged with the voluminous, mainly archaeological, source material that Sand draws upon. But I do wish to critique one of the pillars of this scholarly tome, namely the genetic theory as to the (true or false) ancient Middle Eastern origins of the Jewish people, or specifically the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries and who became the largest original ethnic formation in the State of Israel at its foundation in 1948.
Introduction to the Khazar Theory
The Khazar theory or myth is the idea that Ashkenazi Jews predominantly descend from medieval Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people who formed a powerful polyethnic state in the Caucasus and north of the Caspian, Azov, and the Black Seas. Medieval accounts suggest that members of the Khazar elite converted to Judaism at some point in the 8th or 9th centuries. Over time these Jewish Khazars migrated westward contributing significantly to the population of European Jewry. The narrative was revived by figures like Ernest Renan in the 19th century. Renan was a leading scholar of nationalism who influenced Benedict Anderson the author of Imagined Communities. He believed that “Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning, and they would have an end. And they would probably be replaced by a European confederation” (The European Union). In his belief that nations and national identities are essentially inventions Renan would be a kindred spirit of Shlomo Sand.
However, his writings on race are much more problematic. He believed that racial characteristics were instinctual and deterministic. He viewed the Semitic race as inferior to the Aryan race:
Introduction to the Khazar Theory
The Khazar theory or myth is the idea that Ashkenazi Jews predominantly descend from medieval Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic people who formed a powerful polyethnic state in the Caucasus and north of the Caspian, Azov, and the Black Seas. Medieval accounts suggest that members of the Khazar elite converted to Judaism at some point in the 8th or 9th centuries. Over time these Jewish Khazars migrated westward contributing significantly to the population of European Jewry. The narrative was revived by figures like Ernest Renan in the 19th century. Renan was a leading scholar of nationalism who influenced Benedict Anderson the author of Imagined Communities. He believed that “Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning, and they would have an end. And they would probably be replaced by a European confederation” (The European Union). In his belief that nations and national identities are essentially inventions Renan would be a kindred spirit of Shlomo Sand.
However, his writings on race are much more problematic. He believed that racial characteristics were instinctual and deterministic. He viewed the Semitic race as inferior to the Aryan race:
I am therefore the first to recognise that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, truly represents an inferior combination of human nature.[1]
Echoing the beliefs of adherents to transformative belief systems as divergent as Christianity, Liberalism and Socialism about Judaism, Renan claimed that the Semitic mind was limited by dogmatism and lacked a cosmopolitan conception of civilisation.[2] For him, the Khazar narrative was proof that Semites were “an incomplete race”.[3] However Renan diverged from European racial antisemitism by disputing the concept that the Jewish people constitute a unified racial entity in a biological sense[4]. In that sense, he concurs with the consensus that Jews are an association of tribes with different languages and skin pigmentations rather than a single racial amalgam which was the basis of Nazi racial theory as it relates to Jews and Judaism.
The Thirteenth Tribe
The Khazar theory enjoyed a revival in the 20th century, firstly, with the publication in 1976 of Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe: Khazar Empire And Its Heritage. Koestler argued that the Jewish population in Eastern Europe could not have reached eight million without the contribution of the Khazars. He argued that the Khazar theory would mitigate European racially based antisemitism. He proclaimed his aim in the last chapter of the book to show that the evidence from anthropology along with history refutes the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the Biblical tribe. Koestler drew on the work of Douglas Morton-Dunlop (1909-1987) best known for his histories of Arab civilisation and the Khazar Kyayonate and Raphel Patai whose work focused primarily on the cultural development of the ancient Hebrew and Israelites, on Jewish history and culture and the anthropology of the Middle East generally. Another source was Abraham Polok, an Israeli historian who in 1943 published his book Khazaric History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe. Polok asserted that the Khazars were the demographic foundation of Ashkenazi or East European Jewry.
Koestler did not see their alleged Khazar ancestry as diminishing the claim of Jews to Israel which he felt was based on the UN Mandate and not on Biblical covenants or genetic inheritance. However, in the eyes of his detractors, he helped just that objective as well as facilitating wider antisemitic discourse. While popular reviews of the book were mixed, academic critiques were generally negative. The most excoriating criticisms from two of his biographers – David Cesarani and Michael [5]Scammell.
Cesarani in The Homeless Mind (1998) states that Koestler makes ‘selective use of facts for a grossly polemical end’ and that the book is ‘risible as scholarship’.[6] Scammell in Koestler's The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic (2009) wrote that Koestler’s theory was almost entirely hypothetical and based on the slenderest of circumstantial evidence and takes the book as evidence that his brain “was starting to fail him”.[7]
Michael Barkun writes that Koestler was either unaware of or oblivious to the use that antisemites had made of the Khazar theory since its introduction at the turn of the 20th century.[8] Koestler’s book was praised by the neo-Nazi magazine The Thunderbolt as the “political bombshell of the century”[9]. According to Jeffrey Kaplan, The Thirteenth Tribe was Christian Identity’s “primary source for the Khazar theory” and “sold copies through their mail order service”.[10] Goldstein writes that “Koestler and the Khazar theory he advanced lives on in the fever swamps of the white nationalist movement”[11]. Regarding Jewish claims to Israel, Koestler’s protestations appear to have been pushed aside by a Saudi Arabian delegate to the UN who argued that Koestler’s theory “negated Israel’s right to exist”[12]
By way of defence of the book, Sand states that “While the Khazars scared off the Israeli historians, not one of whom had published a single paper on the subject”, it had annoyed and provoked angry responses’ and he noted that “Hebrew readers had no access to the book for many years learning about it only through the venomous denunciations”[13].
Writing in support of Sand in The Wall Street Journal, Evan Goldstein, Editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education stated that:
The Thirteenth Tribe
The Khazar theory enjoyed a revival in the 20th century, firstly, with the publication in 1976 of Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe: Khazar Empire And Its Heritage. Koestler argued that the Jewish population in Eastern Europe could not have reached eight million without the contribution of the Khazars. He argued that the Khazar theory would mitigate European racially based antisemitism. He proclaimed his aim in the last chapter of the book to show that the evidence from anthropology along with history refutes the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the Biblical tribe. Koestler drew on the work of Douglas Morton-Dunlop (1909-1987) best known for his histories of Arab civilisation and the Khazar Kyayonate and Raphel Patai whose work focused primarily on the cultural development of the ancient Hebrew and Israelites, on Jewish history and culture and the anthropology of the Middle East generally. Another source was Abraham Polok, an Israeli historian who in 1943 published his book Khazaric History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe. Polok asserted that the Khazars were the demographic foundation of Ashkenazi or East European Jewry.
Koestler did not see their alleged Khazar ancestry as diminishing the claim of Jews to Israel which he felt was based on the UN Mandate and not on Biblical covenants or genetic inheritance. However, in the eyes of his detractors, he helped just that objective as well as facilitating wider antisemitic discourse. While popular reviews of the book were mixed, academic critiques were generally negative. The most excoriating criticisms from two of his biographers – David Cesarani and Michael [5]Scammell.
Cesarani in The Homeless Mind (1998) states that Koestler makes ‘selective use of facts for a grossly polemical end’ and that the book is ‘risible as scholarship’.[6] Scammell in Koestler's The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic (2009) wrote that Koestler’s theory was almost entirely hypothetical and based on the slenderest of circumstantial evidence and takes the book as evidence that his brain “was starting to fail him”.[7]
Michael Barkun writes that Koestler was either unaware of or oblivious to the use that antisemites had made of the Khazar theory since its introduction at the turn of the 20th century.[8] Koestler’s book was praised by the neo-Nazi magazine The Thunderbolt as the “political bombshell of the century”[9]. According to Jeffrey Kaplan, The Thirteenth Tribe was Christian Identity’s “primary source for the Khazar theory” and “sold copies through their mail order service”.[10] Goldstein writes that “Koestler and the Khazar theory he advanced lives on in the fever swamps of the white nationalist movement”[11]. Regarding Jewish claims to Israel, Koestler’s protestations appear to have been pushed aside by a Saudi Arabian delegate to the UN who argued that Koestler’s theory “negated Israel’s right to exist”[12]
By way of defence of the book, Sand states that “While the Khazars scared off the Israeli historians, not one of whom had published a single paper on the subject”, it had annoyed and provoked angry responses’ and he noted that “Hebrew readers had no access to the book for many years learning about it only through the venomous denunciations”[13].
Writing in support of Sand in The Wall Street Journal, Evan Goldstein, Editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education stated that:
Sand suggests that those who attacked Koestler’s book did so not because it lacked merit but because the critics were cowards and ideologues. No one wants to go looking under stones, when venomous scorpions might be lurking beneath them waiting to attack the self-image of the existing ethnos and its territorial ambitions.
Therein lies the controversy of the Khazar Theory; its centrality to the antizionist case that the Ashkenazi Jewish claim to descent from the ancient Israelite tribes is tenuous at best and a spurious invention at worst.
The Genetic Debate
The modern academic debate within genetics on the validity or otherwise of the Khazar Hypothesis turns on the work of the Israeli geneticist Eran Elhaik and his associates. In 2012, he argued that:
In later publications, Elhaik and his team modified their theory, proposing simply that the Judaised Khazar kingdom was a core transit area for a federation of Jewish merchants of mixed Iranian, Turkish and Slavik origins, who when that empire collapsed, relocated to Europe[16]. Furthermore, in the 2016 study, Elhaik et al argues that the first Ashkenazi populations to speak the Yiddish language came from areas near villages in Eastern Turkey along the Silk Road whose names derived from the word Ashkenaz, rather than from Germanic kinds as is the general consensus in the scholarship. They proposed that Iranians, Greeks, Turks, and Slavs converted to Judaism in Anatolia prior to migrating to Khazaria where a small-scale conversion had already occurred.
Finally, in 2018 Elhaik stated that the Ashkenazi maternal line is European and that only 3% of Ashkenazi DNA shows links with the Eastern Mediterranean/Middle East, ‘a miniscule amount compared to the proportion of Neanderthal genes in modern European populations’. For Elhaik, the vehicle by which unique Asiatic variations on Ashkenazi Y-chromosomes was the Ashira ruling clan of the Gokturks who converted to Judaism and established the Khazar empire.[17]
Elhaik’s revival of the Khazar hypothesis was comprehensively refuted by twenty co-authors of a study in Human Biology in 2013[18] which argued that Elhaik had inappropriately used modern-day Armenians and Georgians as proxies for Khazars. The authors of this study acknowledged that they cannot rule out the possibility of Ashkenazi Jews having any Khazar ancestry, but because no living people claim direct ancestry from Khazars, Elhaik’s methodology was flawed from the start. They confirm that Ashkenazi Jews “derive strong Jewish genetic markers, primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe[19]. Furthermore, Ashkenazi Jews do not comprise the majority of Israel’s Jewish population. According to a 2016 Pew Research Report, only about 45% of Israeli Jews identify as Ashkenazi while 48% identify as Sephardic or Mizrachi.[20].
In an article published in the journal Jewish Social Studies in June 2014, the Jewish history expert Professor Shaul Stampfer concluded that there was no evidence to support the Khazar hypothesis. He analysed material from many fields but found no [21]reliable evidence for the claim that the Khazars converted to Judaism. For Professor Stampfer, the proof lies primarily in the absence of evidence rather than its presence. For the conversion of the entire kingdom of Khazaria to Judaism merited no mention in contemporary sources.[22]
Alexander Beider bases his absolute rejection of the Khazar theory on the absence of large-scale archaeological evidence of widespread existence of Jews in Khazaria. While a series of independent sources does testify to the existence in the 10th century of Jews in the kingdom and that some of its ruling elite embraced Judaism, the destruction of the Khazarian state by the Russians during the 960s means that it can be confidently asserted that Judaism was not particularly widespread in that kingdom.[23]
Bieder goes onto state that the next historical record of Jews – in a few cities that today belong in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus – show up in the 14th century when Jews are regularly referred to in numerous documents. While one city in NW Ukraine does seem to have an uninterrupted presence from the 12th century, it is only in the 16th century that references to Jews appear in large territories of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Linguistically, the study of Yiddish helps rule out a Khazarian ancestry. Since the 17th century, Yiddish was the vernacular language of all Jews of Eastern European origin. All its main structural elements are German, though during the past few centuries, they also underwent a strong influence of Slavic languages.[24]
This view is shared by all major Yiddish linguists but not by Elhaik’s colleague Paul Wexler who believed there to be certain structural Turkish and Iranian elements “hidden” in Yiddish. All words of Turkic origin came into Yiddish via the intermediary of East Slavic languages. It is the lexicon that keeps the actual traces of languages spoken by ancestors of Yiddish speakers. For that reason, in addition to Hebrew and Aramaic words, Yiddish has a small set of words whose roots come from Old French, Old Czech and Greek.[25]
Some proponents of the Khazarian theory admit the German basis of Yiddish but pretend that it was learned in Eastern Europe by “Indigenous” Jews from rabbis who came from the West and who introduced Yiddish as a “prestige” language. However, only Hebrew and Aramaic as cultural languages were prestigious. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Yiddish brought from Central Europe became the first language for all Jews of Eastern Europe. It was a vernacular rather than a prestige object. Far from prestigious, Yiddish, understood even by children was used to teach students the prestige language of Hebrew. Hebrew could not have been a prestige language because girls, who were not taught languages in school, spoke it too. The role of mothers in the transmission of this everyday language is far more important than that of fathers.[26]
Onomastics, or the study of proper names, can also positively negate the Khazarian hypothesis. Throughout the lifespan of Eastern European Jewish communities over the past six centuries, not a single Turkic name can be found in documents. An etymology of the given names used by Jews in Eastern Europe down the centuries will reveal the same linguistic markers as in the lexicon of Yiddish. There are numerous Germanic and Hebrew names and some Aramaic ones. There are also [27]Greek, Old French, Old Czech, and Polish names and very few East Slavic names. [28]But none with any semblance of the mythical Khazarian origin.
Like any scientific body of knowledge, it may never be possible to definitively disprove the Khazar theory to a degree of absolutely certainty. But there is a convincing body of genetic, linguistic, and historic evidence to refute it or, almost as powerfully, an absence of any significant pointers towards any sort of validation. It has been used in modern times with a variety of bad actors on the far right like Christian Identity, the McCarthyite professor John O. Beaty, the Holocaust denier and convert from Judaism to Catholicism Benjamin Freedman, the Russian nationalist Alexandr Dugain and adherents to the Eleven Lost Tribes of Israel theological mumbo jumbo including the Black Hebrew Israelites sect responsible for the massacre at Jersey City synagogue in 2021. Shlomo Sand does not belong in that gallery of infamy, but his promotion of this controversial, divisive, and widely discredited theory does not aid scholastic understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict nor peace, justice and security for Palestinian Arabs or Israeli Jews.
[1] Stefan Arvidson (2006) Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology, Ideology and Science University of Chicago Press p.107
[2] “The Racial Motif in Renan’s Attitude to Jews and Judaism” in S. Almay (1988) Oxford: pp.255-278
[3] Gotthard Deutsch Antisemitism Jewish Encyclopaedia
[4] Colmann Levy (1883) “Le Judaisme comme Race et comme Religion|: Conference Coite au Cercle Saint-Simon
[5] P.546
[6] Neil McInnes, Koestler, and His Jewish Thesis. The National Interest, Fall 1999
[7] P.548
[8] Michael Barkun (1994) Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement University of North California Press pp.144-45
[9] Scammell p.547.
[10] Jeffrey Kaplan (1997) Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements From the Far Right to the Children of Noah Syracuse University Press pp. 48, 191
[11] Evan Goldstein Inventing Israel 13 October 2009
[12] Scammell, p.547
[13] Shlomo Sand (2009) The Invention of the Jewish People Verso Books, p.238
[14] Eron Elhaik (2012) The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and Khazarian Hypothesis Genome. Biology and Evolution Volume 5, Issue 1 pp.61-74
[15] Eron Elhaik (2012) The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and Khazarian Hypothesis Genome Biology and Evolution Volume 5, Issue 1 pp.61-74
[16] Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia; Eron Elhaik The Origins of Ashkenaz Ashkenazic Jews and Yiddish Frontiers in Genetics 8:87 pp.1-8 21 June 2017; Localising Ashkenazi Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz Genome Biology and Evolution 2016, Vol 8, pp.1132-1149
[17] “Ashkenazic Jews” Mysteries Unravelled by Scientists Thanks to Ancient DNA. The Conversation 5 September 2018.
[18] No Evidence From Genome-wide Data of a Khazar Origin to the Ashkenazi Jews Human Biology Vol.85 No.6 December 2013 pp.859-900
[19] ADL Untangling False Claims About Ashkenazi Jews, Khazars and Israel December 2022
[20] Israel’s Religiously Divided Society Pew Research Centre Report 8 March 2016
[21] Ofer Aderot Forward 26 June 2014
[22] Ofer Aderot Forward 26 June 2014
[23] Alexander Beider Forward 25 September 2017
[24] Ibid
[25] Ibid
[26] Ibid
[27] Ibid
[28] ibid
The Genetic Debate
The modern academic debate within genetics on the validity or otherwise of the Khazar Hypothesis turns on the work of the Israeli geneticist Eran Elhaik and his associates. In 2012, he argued that:
Strong evidence for the Khazarian hypothesis is the clustering of European Jews with the population [in his opinion] resided on opposite ends of ancient Khazaria: Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani Jews. Because Caucasus populations remain relatively isolated in the Caucasus region and because [14]there are no records of Caucasus population mass migration to Eastern and Central Europe prior to the fall of Khazaria, these findings imply a shared origin for European Jews and Caucasus populations[15]
In later publications, Elhaik and his team modified their theory, proposing simply that the Judaised Khazar kingdom was a core transit area for a federation of Jewish merchants of mixed Iranian, Turkish and Slavik origins, who when that empire collapsed, relocated to Europe[16]. Furthermore, in the 2016 study, Elhaik et al argues that the first Ashkenazi populations to speak the Yiddish language came from areas near villages in Eastern Turkey along the Silk Road whose names derived from the word Ashkenaz, rather than from Germanic kinds as is the general consensus in the scholarship. They proposed that Iranians, Greeks, Turks, and Slavs converted to Judaism in Anatolia prior to migrating to Khazaria where a small-scale conversion had already occurred.
Finally, in 2018 Elhaik stated that the Ashkenazi maternal line is European and that only 3% of Ashkenazi DNA shows links with the Eastern Mediterranean/Middle East, ‘a miniscule amount compared to the proportion of Neanderthal genes in modern European populations’. For Elhaik, the vehicle by which unique Asiatic variations on Ashkenazi Y-chromosomes was the Ashira ruling clan of the Gokturks who converted to Judaism and established the Khazar empire.[17]
Elhaik’s revival of the Khazar hypothesis was comprehensively refuted by twenty co-authors of a study in Human Biology in 2013[18] which argued that Elhaik had inappropriately used modern-day Armenians and Georgians as proxies for Khazars. The authors of this study acknowledged that they cannot rule out the possibility of Ashkenazi Jews having any Khazar ancestry, but because no living people claim direct ancestry from Khazars, Elhaik’s methodology was flawed from the start. They confirm that Ashkenazi Jews “derive strong Jewish genetic markers, primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe[19]. Furthermore, Ashkenazi Jews do not comprise the majority of Israel’s Jewish population. According to a 2016 Pew Research Report, only about 45% of Israeli Jews identify as Ashkenazi while 48% identify as Sephardic or Mizrachi.[20].
In an article published in the journal Jewish Social Studies in June 2014, the Jewish history expert Professor Shaul Stampfer concluded that there was no evidence to support the Khazar hypothesis. He analysed material from many fields but found no [21]reliable evidence for the claim that the Khazars converted to Judaism. For Professor Stampfer, the proof lies primarily in the absence of evidence rather than its presence. For the conversion of the entire kingdom of Khazaria to Judaism merited no mention in contemporary sources.[22]
Alexander Beider bases his absolute rejection of the Khazar theory on the absence of large-scale archaeological evidence of widespread existence of Jews in Khazaria. While a series of independent sources does testify to the existence in the 10th century of Jews in the kingdom and that some of its ruling elite embraced Judaism, the destruction of the Khazarian state by the Russians during the 960s means that it can be confidently asserted that Judaism was not particularly widespread in that kingdom.[23]
Bieder goes onto state that the next historical record of Jews – in a few cities that today belong in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus – show up in the 14th century when Jews are regularly referred to in numerous documents. While one city in NW Ukraine does seem to have an uninterrupted presence from the 12th century, it is only in the 16th century that references to Jews appear in large territories of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Linguistically, the study of Yiddish helps rule out a Khazarian ancestry. Since the 17th century, Yiddish was the vernacular language of all Jews of Eastern European origin. All its main structural elements are German, though during the past few centuries, they also underwent a strong influence of Slavic languages.[24]
This view is shared by all major Yiddish linguists but not by Elhaik’s colleague Paul Wexler who believed there to be certain structural Turkish and Iranian elements “hidden” in Yiddish. All words of Turkic origin came into Yiddish via the intermediary of East Slavic languages. It is the lexicon that keeps the actual traces of languages spoken by ancestors of Yiddish speakers. For that reason, in addition to Hebrew and Aramaic words, Yiddish has a small set of words whose roots come from Old French, Old Czech and Greek.[25]
Some proponents of the Khazarian theory admit the German basis of Yiddish but pretend that it was learned in Eastern Europe by “Indigenous” Jews from rabbis who came from the West and who introduced Yiddish as a “prestige” language. However, only Hebrew and Aramaic as cultural languages were prestigious. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Yiddish brought from Central Europe became the first language for all Jews of Eastern Europe. It was a vernacular rather than a prestige object. Far from prestigious, Yiddish, understood even by children was used to teach students the prestige language of Hebrew. Hebrew could not have been a prestige language because girls, who were not taught languages in school, spoke it too. The role of mothers in the transmission of this everyday language is far more important than that of fathers.[26]
Onomastics, or the study of proper names, can also positively negate the Khazarian hypothesis. Throughout the lifespan of Eastern European Jewish communities over the past six centuries, not a single Turkic name can be found in documents. An etymology of the given names used by Jews in Eastern Europe down the centuries will reveal the same linguistic markers as in the lexicon of Yiddish. There are numerous Germanic and Hebrew names and some Aramaic ones. There are also [27]Greek, Old French, Old Czech, and Polish names and very few East Slavic names. [28]But none with any semblance of the mythical Khazarian origin.
Like any scientific body of knowledge, it may never be possible to definitively disprove the Khazar theory to a degree of absolutely certainty. But there is a convincing body of genetic, linguistic, and historic evidence to refute it or, almost as powerfully, an absence of any significant pointers towards any sort of validation. It has been used in modern times with a variety of bad actors on the far right like Christian Identity, the McCarthyite professor John O. Beaty, the Holocaust denier and convert from Judaism to Catholicism Benjamin Freedman, the Russian nationalist Alexandr Dugain and adherents to the Eleven Lost Tribes of Israel theological mumbo jumbo including the Black Hebrew Israelites sect responsible for the massacre at Jersey City synagogue in 2021. Shlomo Sand does not belong in that gallery of infamy, but his promotion of this controversial, divisive, and widely discredited theory does not aid scholastic understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict nor peace, justice and security for Palestinian Arabs or Israeli Jews.
[1] Stefan Arvidson (2006) Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology, Ideology and Science University of Chicago Press p.107
[2] “The Racial Motif in Renan’s Attitude to Jews and Judaism” in S. Almay (1988) Oxford: pp.255-278
[3] Gotthard Deutsch Antisemitism Jewish Encyclopaedia
[4] Colmann Levy (1883) “Le Judaisme comme Race et comme Religion|: Conference Coite au Cercle Saint-Simon
[5] P.546
[6] Neil McInnes, Koestler, and His Jewish Thesis. The National Interest, Fall 1999
[7] P.548
[8] Michael Barkun (1994) Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement University of North California Press pp.144-45
[9] Scammell p.547.
[10] Jeffrey Kaplan (1997) Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements From the Far Right to the Children of Noah Syracuse University Press pp. 48, 191
[11] Evan Goldstein Inventing Israel 13 October 2009
[12] Scammell, p.547
[13] Shlomo Sand (2009) The Invention of the Jewish People Verso Books, p.238
[14] Eron Elhaik (2012) The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and Khazarian Hypothesis Genome. Biology and Evolution Volume 5, Issue 1 pp.61-74
[15] Eron Elhaik (2012) The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and Khazarian Hypothesis Genome Biology and Evolution Volume 5, Issue 1 pp.61-74
[16] Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia; Eron Elhaik The Origins of Ashkenaz Ashkenazic Jews and Yiddish Frontiers in Genetics 8:87 pp.1-8 21 June 2017; Localising Ashkenazi Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz Genome Biology and Evolution 2016, Vol 8, pp.1132-1149
[17] “Ashkenazic Jews” Mysteries Unravelled by Scientists Thanks to Ancient DNA. The Conversation 5 September 2018.
[18] No Evidence From Genome-wide Data of a Khazar Origin to the Ashkenazi Jews Human Biology Vol.85 No.6 December 2013 pp.859-900
[19] ADL Untangling False Claims About Ashkenazi Jews, Khazars and Israel December 2022
[20] Israel’s Religiously Divided Society Pew Research Centre Report 8 March 2016
[21] Ofer Aderot Forward 26 June 2014
[22] Ofer Aderot Forward 26 June 2014
[23] Alexander Beider Forward 25 September 2017
[24] Ibid
[25] Ibid
[26] Ibid
[27] Ibid
[28] ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Barry - as always a well laid out and argued piece.
ReplyDeleteBenedict Anderson brought logic to myth with his Imagined Communities work. Although his topic was nationalisms in general.
I don't feel the piece addresses the main contention of Sand that:
there was no Jewish exodus from Egypt; that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were a mere fable; that the Jews were not a common diaspora which wandered from Jerusalem to Moscow and then back to their homeland after a period of almost two thousand years.
Even more importantly in terms of lived experience the piece overlooks the very salient run of questions posed by Sand in which he observed that any:
attempt to organize the world as it was organized hundreds or thousands of years ago would mean the injection of violent deceptive insanity into the overall system of international relations. Would anyone today consider encouraging an Arab demand to settle in the Iberian Peninsula to establish a Muslim state there simply because their ancestors were expelled from the region during the Reconquista?
Israel is no different from so many other colonial projects dressed up as something else: a theft of land aided by the West after other land the Zionists had considered stealing moved off the agenda. Its Nazi -like treatment of the population in Gaza suggests it is also the worst type of colonial regime. Any project that focuses so intensely on the mass murder of children, can't really be described in any other way but Nazi-like.
The Sand book is well worth a read. His interviews also, where he pushes back against the type of criticism you make, are worth hearing.
Not that because he says something that appeals to us is right - far from it. Yet he gives so much cause for confidence that he is closer to the truth than the Zionists who hate him yet fail to convincingly refute him.
Nevertheless, a great piece.
Anthony, thanks for the feedback.
ReplyDeleteI did make it clear that I was only dealing with the Khazar theory; not the Jewish exodus from Egypt; the sack of Jerusalem and Babylon or any of the other elements of the case that Sand makes because I have not read the book and to make any sort of critique would not do him justice. I suspect that Simon Schama would have something to say in his work on the Jews and their origins.
I personally believe that Zionism as a concept should be retired from debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict and that litigation over the events on 1948 and earlier. Zionism came into being as a response to the persecution of Jews in the 19th century and since the dawn of the First Millenniums. The triumph of its political project of a Jewish homeland or state in Palestine was made possible by the transformative impact on Jews of the Holocaust; the descendants of Arabs and Muslims expelled from the Iberian Peninsula did not suffer a comparable fate. Now that it's goal has long been established, the term Zionism is actually stripped of meaning.
My condemnation of the Gazacide catastrophe is perfectly compatible with my support for the creation of Israel on the basis of a UN Mandate and rejection of that Israel was a settler-colonial project from the start. Those who wish to put forward that view should not rely on flawed theories like the Khazar hypothesis to support it.
I mentioned Schama in the review, feeling his return of serve was weak. The Israeli state was legitimate because of what Jews had suffered. That does not address the horrors inflicted on the Palestinians. What should their reward be?
DeleteThere is not a chance of Zionism being retired from the debate. The response would be akin to a suggestion to retire Nazism from the debate had the Germans taken Moscow or Stalingrad. This is the cause of a deep running historical sore that cannot be wished out of existence.
The Holocaust, horrendous and unforgiveable as it was, conveys no right to steal land. Moscow could as easily cite what happened to the people it governed during WW2 to plunder Ukraine and anywhere else. Given the numbers in the War of Extermination they would have even more of a claim than the Zionists. Those murdered dwarf by maybe 700% the deaths during the Holocaust. It still conveys no right to colonise.
A Jewish state flies in the face of democratic secularism. Sand makes an argument for an Israeli state that represents all Israeli citizens rather than a Jewish state.
I see the Board of Deputies of British Jews have been trying to silence dissent from the genocide. When Jews openly back genocide, suggesting it is a Jewish genocide rather than an Israeli one per se, this must fuel the flames of antisemitism.
ReplyDeleteA growing number of progressive Jewish organisations within Israel and throughout the Diaspora are opposing the Gazacide. While I abhor the Board of Deputies suppression of dissent, I am not sure of the point you are making, Anthony.
Deleteshould have been clearer Barry - wasn't making a point. Just came across that on my feed as I was chatting with you and thought it a useful piece of news to get out. It is totally unrelated to this article or follow up discussion.
DeleteThe Palestinian reward should be the independent state that most of the world wants for it. How can you say on one hand the Jewish state was legitimate because of what the Jews had suffered and the on the other that the Holocaust conferred no right to steal land? Agreed that Israel should represent all its citizens which actually it claims to do. Presumably the borders should be pre 1967.
ReplyDeleteSchama said that the Jewish state was legitimate because of what the Jews suffered, not me. I said the Holocaust conferred no right to steal land. Just as Moscow has no right to steal land because of an even worse experience during WW2 than the Jews.
DeleteIsrael claiming to do or be something - nobody takes it seriously. The most moral army is one of its claims yet its ranks are populated by dedicated child killers.
Sand seems right that there is no 'Jewish people', there is a Jewish religion. How can a Brooklyn Jew have more rights in Israel than an Israeli Arab? If it was a state for Israeli citizens the Israeli Arab should have full rights, the Brooklyn Jew, none.
Ethically, I support a single state solution but the political probability of that is zilch.
Moscow does use the suffering during the Great Patriotic War to justify it's plunder of Ukraine on the spurious grounds of the " Neo Nazi" regime in Kiev. Stalin carried out some horrible stuff including the rape of two million German women in Berlin, the deportation and deaths of tens of thousands of Crimean Tartars and the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans.
ReplyDeleteStalin was a murderous thug. The point is he had no right to steal land because of the appalling crimes committed against the people he governed. Same as Ben Gurion and his fellow gangsters - no right to steal land.
DeleteI think we will have to agree to disagree on the nature of the 'land theft' or dispossession.
ReplyDeletewe have long disagreed on it.
DeleteCam comments
ReplyDeleteBarry,
Go to any browser, Bing, Chrome, Mozilla, any browser at all and search for Rothchilds and Khazars and you will find nothing but 'Jewish' and Israeli supporting sites all debunking the conspiracy theory....a few years ago when you did this loads of websites would appear with loads of information supporting the various conspiracies.....some of those sites I saved in my favourites not because I believed any of them but I wanted to reference them to a conspiracy theorist friend of mine who also believes the Chinese are listening and watching us through mobile phone masts and when I confronted him why Chinese and not Americans or the Brits and what information would the Chinese hope to gain by watching North Belfast people walk around the water works or even from him himself!!!!!! but when I now click on them I can't access those web pages any longer.....Israel has control of quite a lot of the narrative of its history and Jewish history in Europe in particular....impossible now to find all those sites from years gone by....you have understand that Israel controls Google, Dell, HP, CISCO (which provides most of the world with routers and firewalls including all the banks), Fortinet (also a major router / firewall provider) Amazon, Oracle, Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft........it defines the narrative now....the control they have is so startling most people don't realise it.
Cam,
DeleteHow does that work when the amount of pro Gaza/Palestine propaganda on social media is impressive? ( as is the amount of social media coming out of a warzone-electricity to charge mobile phones doesn't seem to be an issue). Not saying I don't believe you just curious.
Way off topic comment from me, but thanks for confirming Cam that data has long been washed out of the Internet.
DeleteTwenty five years ago or thereabouts I found details
of a substantial number of squaddies reportedly killed in a freak motor incident in 1972 in what was then West Germany (a speeding sports car supposedly ran into a platoon) My hunch back then was that this was part of a cover up for casualties incurred in a operation in Fermanagh for which John Downey still awaits trial. Two UDR fatalities were acknowledged but nothing else. The target on the occasion was a tarpaulin covered truck carrying squadies back to their St. Angelo base after rest & recreation in hostelries in Enniskillen.
I have searched several times since over the years and could never trace the report. I was begining to question that memory.
There's a story for any investigative journalist worthy of the name!