(This is NOT a diary about the contemporary state of Israel or Palestine so please do not treat it as such.)
If someone were to claim, in the face of all scientific evidence, that global warming is a hoax, they would be mocked, HRd, and possibly banned from this site.
If someone were to claim, in the face of all scientific evidence, that there is a link between vaccines and autism, they would be mocked, HRd, and possibly banned from this site.
And yet, people here cite a claim that has been as thoroughly disproven by all available evidence as the two examples cited above. That disproven hypothesis is the 'Khazar origin' for the Jewish people of Europe.
The evidence is primarily genetic research, along with linguistic knowledge and the historical record. So, in a triumph of scholarship, we have science, social science, and the humanities all united in flushing out the truth... If, as the left, we care about truth, science, and evidence, then we should treat the Khazar notion the same way we treat the former two.
The history is interesting so let's examine it:
The Khazar story
To briefly summarize, the Khazars were a Turkic-speaking originally nomadic group from Central Asia who ruled an empire spanning parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus starting in the 8th century. Remarkably, and largely unique in history, the ruling class of the Khazars converted to Judaism from their original tribal religion. After several centuries, the empire lost ground to competitors and the Khazars disappeared as a distinct group.
Fast forward to the 20th century, and the Khazars were invoked as a possible origin for the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe, the so-called 'Ashkenazim'. The idea would be that the Khazars converted en masse, and settled in Eastern Europe. This idea was primarily the doing of the anti-Semitic right, people whose motivation was to make contemporary Jews 'non-white' in order to justify hatred in their eyes. However, elements of the left and even some Jewish writers adopted the theory also, with a variety of motivations. Lately, it has featured in Shlomo Sand's polemic The Invention of the Jewish People. But it ain't true.
The real story
This is in contrast to the standard (and correct) story for the origin of the Jews of Europe, which goes as follows: By the fall of the Roman Empire, Jewish people lived throughout it. Some ventured from the Mediterranean to Northern Italy, Southern Gaul, and eventually the Rhineland. A vernacular language, Yiddish, developed based on Germanic with some of the Hebrew, Latin, and Greek influences that the migrants brought. The Jews had oscillating fates under the Franks, Charlemagne, and other rulers, and spread throughout France, Germany, England, and other places. By the 11th century, the term 'Ashkenazim' was in use, "Ashkenaz" being the medieval Hebrew word for central Europe.
The medieval Ashkenazim were often involved in trades that were forbidden to the Christian population and sometimes achieved a measure of success. Anti-Semitism got much worse as time went on, and a series of expusions drove the Ashkenazim out of various polities. At the same time, the kings of Poland and Lithuania were looking to expand their tax and skill base, and invited the Ashkenazim to migrate East and settle, which many did. The Jewish community of Europe, now in both Central and Eastern Europe, was augmented by expulsions from Spain and various Italian localities starting in the 1400s. Eventually many of the territories of Poland and Lithuania fell to the Russian Empire, so that by the 19th century and mass immigration, the Ashkenazim were roughly distributed throughout the German States, Poland, and the Russian and Austrian empires.
The evidence
So how did the Ashkenazim get there? West or East? We now have the tools to definitively decide between the Khazar hypothesis and the standard picture.
The evidence: Genetics
Studies of Y-chromosomes and Mitochondrial DNA allow the reconstruction of relationships among groups of people. There have been many studies on Jewish people throughout the world, whether from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, India, and so on, and the results are fascinating.
The major conclusion is that there is a high degree of similarity in the Y-chromosomes of Jewish men throughout the world, and similarity between Jewish men and the Arab inhabitants of the Levant.
For instance, around 80% of Askenazic men have the Y-chromosome classification E or J, both of which are uncommon in Northern Europe - and Central Asia, but ubiquitous throughout the middle East. This indicates that the Jewish population of Europe has a large founding influence of people with Middle Eastern origins, but not Central Asian ones.
In the conclusion of a Y-chromosome study published in PNAS (M. Hammer et al., 1999),
The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.
It is also interesting to study the Y-chromosomes of men belonging to the so-called 'Cohenim', or priestly class (generally those with the last name Cohen, Kohn, Kahn, and so on). Cohen men throughout the world have the same Y-chromosome mutation at a very high rate, indicating that they are actually descended patrilineally from one common ancestor. This argues further against the mass conversion idea of the Khazars. In the words of a paper on a study of Cohen Y-chromosomes published in Nature (M. Thomas et al., 1998)
Given the relative isolation of Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities over the past 500 years, the presence of the same modal haplotype in the Cohanim of both communities strongly suggests a common origin.
Lastly, there is Mitochondrial DNA evidence, which shows that a very high proportion - up to 40% - of Ashkenazim are descended matrilineally from as few as four (!) women, and other Jewish populations throughout the world show descent from these women (summary here). This again rules out a mass settlement of the Khazars in Europe in the middle ages as the origin of the bulk of the Jewish population there - for there would have certainly had to be far more than 4 individuals to achieve the number of matrilineal descendants today in that amount of time.
In summary, genetic studies alone are sufficient to rule out Khazars being the bulk of European Jews' ancestry. But there is still more.
The evidence: Linguistics
The vernacular language of the Ashkenazim was Yiddish. Yiddish is classified as a Germanic language. In addition to its similarities with German, there is a substantial contribution in the vocabulary from Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and, to a lesser extent, the Slavic languages.
This makes sense in light of the standard picture for the origin of the Ashkenazim: a group that migrated from the Middle East through the Greco-Roman world and to Central Europe, then much later to Eastern Europe, all the while exchanging commerce, ideas, and wives with their surroundings.
The lack of any Turkic elements in Yiddish certainly makes the Khazar origin extremely unlikely. How could Yiddish preserve plenty of 1500 year old Latin elements but no 700 year old Khazar elements, if indeed the Khazars were important in the history of the Ashkenazim? This indicates they were not.
It is also interesting to consider the Ashkenazic Jewish last names which can indicate place of origin, for these can shed some light on the places a population migrated from. In Eastern Europe, Jews have names like, for example, Bloch (from Vlochy, archaic name for Italy), Wine (Vienna), Elias (from Hellas, aka Greece), Frankfurter (obvious) and so on. Although my own ancestors came to the US from Congress Poland, my last name clearly indicates what Italian city they originated from generations before that. However, in contrast, there are few if any Ashkenazic last names that indicate a family origin location to the East.
The evidence: Historical Record
Lastly, we have the simple historical record. As early as 629 the Frankish king Dagobert I expelled Jews from his realm. This shows Jews were already living in Northern Europe long before the conversion of the Khazars.
In contrast, there are no writings - by Byzantines or Armenians, for instance - that indicate anything like a mass Khazar migration to Central Europe.
Conclusion
Genetic studies alone are sufficient to rule out Khazars being the bulk of European Jews' ancestry. Beyond that, we have the content of Yiddish, and the historical record, as a guide to the history of the Ashkenazic people.
All of these lines of evidence agree on the standard picture, that the Jewish people of Central and Eastern Europe represent a lengthy historical journey from the Middle East through the Greco-Roman world, and into Central and then later Eastern Europe. This culture, and the people in it, were a vibrant blend of Hebraic, Mediterranean, and Germanic heritages.
The Khazars, while fascinating in their own right, did not contribute appreciably to the development of the subsequent Jewish people. To continue to claim so, in the face of all evidence, is ignorant at best, but often just dishonest, in the service of some agenda. The true story of the origin of the Jewish people exists in its own right, independent of any presumed implications for a just settlement of the I/P question, or any other political issue. The issue here is truth, and people who promote the Khazar hypothesis are on the wrong side of that.
This series:
- Jewish history: fact and myth I - The Jews of the Shtetls, Khazar or not Khazar
- Jewish history: fact and myth II - The far flung Iberians
- Jewish origins 3: Africa - Back in Black
- Jewish origins 4: Babel on - Iraq, Persia, Central Asia
- Jewish origins 5: India and China - Call center cousins
- Jewish origins: Vol 6: Continuity, and what is a Jew?