Chapter 37. Who Is a Jew? The Khazar Debate, Jewish Identity and the Road to Zionism

Part 4 closes with a question the Second Temple period did not settle and modern history made political: who, by descent, belief or law, counts as a Jew? The question matters for the study of religion because modern answers to it have been used to justify a state, to oppose that state, and to build theories about hidden power. This chapter sets out the main positions in the library side by side. First come the revisionist theses of Arthur Koestler (the Khazar origin of East European Jewry) and Shlomo Sand (the “Jewish people” as a modern national construct). Then come the reference shelf’s genetic counter-evidence and the medical-genetics literature, followed by the polemical and conspiracist uses of the Khazar theme, each attributed to its author. The chapter ends with the political road from Herzl through Balfour to 1948, read through Reed, Robert John, Khalidi, Heisman and Keshe. Part 14 continues the later history.

Khazaria and the Conversion

Koestler opens The Thirteenth Tribe with a geopolitical claim: “About the time when Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the West, the eastern confines of Europe between the Caucasus and the Volga were ruled by a Jewish state, known as the Khazar Empire. At the peak of its power, from the seventh to the tenth centuries AD, it played a significant part in shaping the destinies of mediaeval, and consequently of modern, Europe” [Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, #67932, Part One, ch. I “Rise”]. He describes the Khazars as “a people of Turkish stock” holding the gateway between the Black Sea and the Caspian. As evidence of their standing he cites Constantine Porphyrogenitus: imperial letters to the Khazar king carried a gold seal worth three solidi, against two for letters to the Pope or the Western Emperor [Koestler, #67932, Part One, ch. I].

The military argument rests on D. M. Dunlop, whom Koestler quotes at length. In the Arab-Khazar wars, which “lasted more than a hundred years”, the Khazars held the Caucasus line, so that “but for the existence of the Khazars in the region north of the Caucasus, Byzantium… would have found itself outflanked by the Arabs” [Koestler, #67932, Part One, ch. I, quoting Dunlop]. In 732 the future Constantine V married a Khazar princess, and their son became Leo IV, “Leo the Khazar”. Then, “probably AD 740, the King, his court and the military ruling class embraced the Jewish faith, and Judaism became the state religion of the Khazars” [Koestler, #67932, Part One, ch. I]. Koestler follows Bury in reading the choice as political: Judaism was a third creed that let the Khagan avoid submitting to either the Caliph or the Emperor. “There can be no question that the ruler was actuated by political motive” [Koestler, #67932, Part One, quoting Bury]. His main Hebrew source is the tenth-century exchange between Hasdai ibn Shaprut of Córdoba and King Joseph of Khazaria. Joseph’s reply contains “the story of the conversion” [Koestler, #67932, Part One, on the Hasdai-Joseph correspondence].

The best-known medieval Jewish literary treatment of the conversion is Judah Halevi’s Kuzari (“Book of the Khazar”), completed in 1139-40 CE. It is a dialogue between a rabbi and the Khazar king; the reference shelf adds that the historicity of the conversion “is debated” (Moshe Gil and Shaul Stampfer doubt it) and “the scale of conversions within the Khazar Khaganate (if, indeed, any occurred) is unknown” [Wikipedia: Kuzari].

Koestler’s “Heritage” Thesis

Part Two of Koestler’s book, “The Heritage”, follows the Khazars after their state was destroyed. Koestler’s conclusion is direct: “The evidence quoted in previous chapters adds up to a strong case in favour of those modern historians — whether Austrian, Israeli or Polish — who, independently from each other, have argued that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin” [Koestler, #67932, Part Two “The Heritage”]. He argues that Yiddish, “a curious amalgam of Hebrew, mediaeval German, Slavonic and other elements”, counts against a Franco-Rhenish origin of Eastern Jewry [Koestler, #67932, Part Two]. The book’s jacket states what is at stake: if the theory were confirmed, “the term ‘anti-Semitism’ would become void of meaning”, being based “on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated” [Koestler, #67932, jacket text].

The reference shelf notes that Koestler’s source Dunlop was “much more tentative”, that academic critiques were “generally negative”, and that Koestler’s aim, per his biographer Scammell, was to remove “the racial basis for anti-Semitism”; Koestler himself held that “the problem of the Khazar infusion a thousand years ago… is irrelevant to modern Israel”, whose claim rested in his view on the UN mandate [Wikipedia: The Thirteenth Tribe].

Sand: Mythistory, the Exile and the Realms of Silence

Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) widens the argument from Khazaria to the whole national narrative. Chapter 1, “Making Nations”, treats peoples as products of modern nationalism. Chapter 2, “Mythistory”, examines how nineteenth-century historiography turned the Bible into national history. Sand writes that Heinrich Graetz, “although he was never a complete Zionist… formed the national mold for the writing of Jewish history”. Graetz pictured the people as “an organic body with a miraculous capacity for rebirth” [Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, #70790, ch. 2]. Sand sets Graetz against Heinrich von Treitschke, who answered that “a full merger of Jewry with the peoples of the West will never be achieved” [Sand, #70790, ch. 2].

Chapter 3, “The Invention of the Exile”, asks: “Was the population of Judea exiled after the fall of the Second Temple, or is that a Christian myth that not accidentally ended up as part of Jewish tradition?” [Sand, #70790, Introduction and ch. 3]. Sand’s answer is “exile without expulsion”: Judaism spread through proselytism and conversion. Chapter 4, “Realms of Silence”, follows the converts: the kingdom of Himyar in southern Arabia, the Berbers and the “Mysterious Queen Kahina”, and the Khazars (“Jewish Kagans? A Strange Empire Rises in the East”) [Sand, #70790, ch. 4, contents].

In the section “The Enigma: The Origin of Eastern Europe’s Jews”, Sand argues that until the 1960s the Caucasian-Volga origin of most Yiddish speakers “was an acceptable assumption, caused no shock, and was not considered anti-Semitic, as it was after the early 1970s”. He links the change to 1967: the “City of David” had to be conquered “by the direct descendants of the House of David — not… by the offspring of tough horsemen from the Volga-Don steppes” [Sand, #70790, ch. 4]. He also cites Ben-Zion Dinur calling Khazaria the “diaspora mother” of Russian, Lithuanian and Polish Jewry, Paul Wexler on the Slavic base of Yiddish, the Turkic etymology of davenen, and the Rhineland’s tiny medieval Jewish population (“a few hundred to a few thousand”) as unable to explain the East’s “demographic ‘big bang'”. He concludes: “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” [Sand, #70790, ch. 4]. Chapter 5, “The Distinction: Identity Politics in Israel”, turns to the state. Sand writes that Israel “still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that serves its citizens”, while one quarter of its citizens are not classed as Jews [Sand, #70790, Introduction and ch. 5].

The Counter-Evidence: Genetics and Founder Effects

The reference shelf takes the opposite view. It calls the Khazar theory “a largely abandoned historical hypothesis” and states that “genetic studies on Jews have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews”. Behar et al. (2013) found no Caucasus/Khazar markers. Atzmon et al. found “mixed Near Eastern and Southern European/Mediterranean origins”, though they “did not exclude” some later Khazar and Slavic admixture. Xue et al. consider a wholly Khazar origin “out of the question” [Wikipedia: Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry]. The same article traces the idea back to Johann Ewers (1808), Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1828) and Ernest Renan’s Paris lecture of 1883. It notes that Eran Elhaik revived the hypothesis in 2013, and that it is “still sometimes used in antisemitic conspiracy theories and in various anti-Zionist approaches” [Wikipedia: Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry].

The Genetic studies of Jews article summarises autosomal work as showing “high levels of genetic relatedness among Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews, corresponding to a shared Middle Eastern ancestry with variations in regional admixture”. It adds that there is “no single definitive Jewish prototype”, and that Southern European reference populations themselves carry ancient Middle Eastern ancestry [Wikipedia: Genetic studies of Jews].

Nicholas Gillham’s medical-genetics textbook approaches the question through disease. “Tay-Sachs disease is 100 times more frequent in infants of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry than in non-Jewish infants”. Small founding populations can amplify a harmful gene “just by chance”. Gillham notes that the main Cajun Tay-Sachs mutation is identical to one found in 70% of Ashkenazi carriers [Gillham, Genes, Chromosomes and Disease, #27274, “Ethnicity and Genetic Disease: Acadians and Ashkenazi Jews”]. He then presents the two competing explanations. Neil Risch’s view is that the Ashkenazi diseases are “the result of genetic drift”. Cochran, Hardy and Harpending’s 2006 paper, “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence”, instead proposed selection: carriers of the four lysosomal storage diseases gain neuronal growth. Risch was “not persuaded”. Gillham himself suggests the hypotheses “need not be mutually exclusive” [Gillham, #27274, “Evolutionary Hypotheses for Ashkenazi Genetic Diseases”].

Polemical and Conspiracist Uses

Several library authors turn the Khazar thesis into an argument about power. David Icke quotes Koestler on Jews in Hungary and Poland as “mintmasters… tax-collectors and ‘money-lenders'”. He claims that the Khazars were “the ancestors of at least 90 per cent of those calling themselves ‘Jewish’ today” and “had nothing whatsoever to do with the land called Israel”. He also claims that an Ashkenazi leadership “not Jewish by blood… took over Palestine on an historical fabrication” [Icke, Tales From the Time Loop, #6170, ch. on the Khazars]. James Perloff, in his chapter “Zionism”, cites a genetics report that “52 percent of Levites of Ashkenazi origin have a particular genetic signature that originated in Central Asia”. He reads this Y-chromosome lineage from “a few men, or perhaps a single ancestor… about 1,000 years ago” as possibly Khazar [Perloff, Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, #74108, ch. 13].

The Romanian author Cornel-Dan Niculae states that “the Khazar or Ashkenazi Jews, Turkomans from the Asian steppes, are today the owners of the great businesses of the whole world, of high finance”, and that they lead the “mondialist” bodies of the West under a Jewish identity. He calls Yehuda Halevi “a Zionist Khazar Jew” whose Kuzari (dated by Niculae to 1141) held that the Jewish nation is the sole mediator between God and humanity [Niculae, Războiul nevăzut al evreilor sionişti cu românii, #75037, chs. 5-6]. The anonymous Modern Day Serpent People of the Bible argues from a Black Hebrew Israelite position that Ashkenazim “are not Shemites; they’re the children of Ashkenaz”, descendants of Japheth, and “the Khazar currently impersonating the true Israelites of the Bible” [Unknown Hebrew, The Modern Day Serpent People of the Bible, #68765, parts 3-6]. On the reference shelf’s account, the neo-Nazi Thunderbolt and the Christian Identity movement also took up Koestler’s book [Wikipedia: The Thirteenth Tribe].

From Herzl to Balfour to 1948

According to Isidor Epstein, Herzl’s Basel congress of 1897 formulated the programme of political Zionism as the creation “in Palestine of a legally guaranteed homeland for the Jewish people” (Epstein’s Romanian text, rendered here in English). The movement met strong opposition from both the Orthodox and the Reform. The Reform saw it as defying their doctrine that Jews are “only a religious community”, and many in both camps held it contrary to political loyalty to their countries of citizenship [Epstein, Iudaismul, #15429, Part on modern Judaism]. Karen Armstrong records that for “the vast majority of the Orthodox” Zionism meant trampling “blasphemously upon a sacred reality”, led as it was by atheists, socialists and Marxists. She adds that the Neturei Karta and the Satmar Hasidim remain anti-Zionist today [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064].

Mitchell Heisman reads Herzl as confirming a thesis about enmity. Herzl held that the “propelling force in the creation of a Jewish state” was antisemitism: “our enemies have made us one… It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, Part II, part 104]. In Heisman’s broader scheme, Judaism “had to combine contradictory values”. It took a step towards “a transcendence of biology: God”, yet “since Jews themselves could not fully escape being biological beings”, they also had to secure their own survival [Heisman, #38252, Part II, part 64]. He applies this paradox to Israel and Palestine.

The Balfour Declaration was issued on 2 November 1917 as a letter to Lord Rothschild. Robert John’s diplomatic history reconstructs what happened behind the scenes. Louis Brandeis “had either persuaded Wilson that there was nothing in the draft (Rothschild) declaration of 19 September” amounting to “any real commitment”, or had induced the President to change his mind. On 12 November Weizmann wrote to thank Brandeis [John, Behind the Balfour Declaration, #39567, drawing on the Wilson Papers in Stein, The Balfour Declaration]. John also quotes Sokolow, writing two months before the Declaration, on a falling-off in British “philo-sémitisme” that some ascribed to the view that Russian Jews were “the mainspring of Bolshevism” [John, #39567].

Douglas Reed’s chapters “Herzl”, “The ‘Protocols'” and “The Aberration of Mr. Balfour” present the Declaration as a capture of British policy [Reed, The Controversy of Zion, #64653, chs. 26-28]. Reed argues that Weizmann “arrived in Palestine in 1917, supported by British arms and British gold, and in 1947, supported by American money and power” [Reed, #64653]. He also holds that because the biblical Israelites rejected Judah’s creed, the use of the name “Israel” by the Zionist state “is in the nature of a forgery” [Reed, #64653, ch. 2].

Rashid Khalidi gives the Palestinian reading. Balfour mentioned the Arab majority, then “around 94 percent”, only “in a backhanded way as the ‘existing non-Jewish communities'”. Khalidi writes: “the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate constituted the first declaration of war on the Palestinian people by a great power”, followed by the 1947 UN partition resolution [Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, #62730, ch. 1]. Slavicek’s chronology gives the standard sequence: 1947, UN recommendation of partition into Jewish and Arab states; 14 May 1948, declaration of the State of Israel as Britain withdraws; 1948-49, the First Arab-Israeli War; 1956, Suez-Sinai; 1967, the Six-Day War. The same chronology states, against Sand, that the revolt ending in 135 CE brought the “exile of most Jews from Judea” [Slavicek, Israel, #63054, Chronology].

Keshe’s Position

Mehran Keshe treats the identity question in moral and spiritual terms. To the claim “We are the chosen ones” he replies: “Yes, you are chosen to be punished for the rest to learn from. You are not chosen to be, to own everything. You are the chosen to be the examples of the humanity to learn about how evil can be” [Keshe, KSW 598, #378310, part 51]. In KSW 608 he declares: “They shall have no home, let alone the land they took by occupation”. He adds at once that “this is not just to the followers of Moses, it’s the same for the Jews, the same for the Muslims, the same for Christians, same for Buddhists, the same for the whole of humanity” [Keshe, KSW 608, #378320, part 15]. In KSW 654 he sets out the Foundation’s membership rules: “You carry Israeli passport, you’re denied. You carry Belgian passport, you’re denied”, and members of armed forces should “not apply”. He describes himself as “half Jewish” in the same workshop [Keshe, KSW 654, #378366, membership section].

Key points

• Koestler dates the Khazar conversion to c. 740 CE. He credits the Khazars with blocking the Arab advance and argues that “the bulk of modern Jewry” is Caucasian, not Palestinian, in origin [#67932].
• Sand treats the Exile as a myth and Jewish peoplehood as a modern national construction. He emphasises mass conversion (Himyar, the Berbers, the Khazars) and the post-1967 political stakes [#70790].
• The reference shelf calls the Khazar hypothesis “largely abandoned”. It reports shared Middle Eastern ancestry with Southern European admixture among Jewish populations [Wikipedia].
• Gillham reports the Ashkenazi founder-effect diseases and the unresolved choice between drift (Risch) and selection (Cochran-Hardy-Harpending) [#27274].
• Icke, Perloff, Niculae and the Serpent People author use the Khazar theme to deny Jewish descent or to allege Khazar financial and political power. Their claims are reported here as their claims.
• Herzl saw antisemitism as Zionism’s “propelling force”. Reform and most Orthodox opinion initially opposed the movement [#38252, #15429, #53064].
• Balfour (2 November 1917) is read as backstage diplomacy (John), as a capture of British policy (Reed), and as a “declaration of war” on Palestinians (Khalidi). It leads to partition (1947) and the founding of the state (14 May 1948).
• Keshe reframes “chosenness” as exemplary punishment. He applies landlessness to all religions and excludes holders of Israeli passports from his Foundation.