The Most Cruel Hoax History has Ever Known

Ashkenazi Jewry and the Khazarian Conversion

[T]he large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European — and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar — origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Voiga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then the term ‘anti-Semitism’ would become void of meaning, based on a mis-apprehension 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 known.

-Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe (1976)

Dear Nevermorons,

In the Summer of 2021, I learned from a long-lost cousin that I am 1/64th Ashkenazi Jew.

After finding this out, I decided to learn more about Ashkenazi Jews. I had heard that they may have been originally been from a place called Khazaria, and then they had converted to Judaism at some point a long time ago.

I knew that Arthur Koestler had written a book about the Khazarian hypothesis, so I decided to get my hands on a copy.

WHAT IS THE KHAZARIAN HYPOTHESIS?

If you look up “Khazarian Hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry” on Wikipedia, you will quickly be informed that this “theory about Jewish descent” has been “largely abandoned”.

You will be told that:

The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, often called the Khazar myth by its critics,^[1][2] is a largely abandoned historical hypothesis that postulated that Ashkenazi Jews were primarily, or to a large extent, descended from Khazars, a multi-ethnic conglomerate of mostly Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic khanate in and around the northern and central Caucasus and the Pontic–Caspian steppe.

Speculation that Europe's Jewish population originated among the Khazars has persisted for two centuries, from at least as early as 1808. In the late 19th century, Ernest Renan and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe originated among refugees who had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into Europe. Though intermittently evoked by several scholars since that time, the Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976.^[6][3]

It has been revived recently by geneticist Eran Elhaik, who in 2013 conducted a study aiming to vindicate it.^[7]

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEPHARDIC AND ASHKENAZI JEWS?

Okay, so we’ve got do a bit of housecleaning before we really get into this. Most Jews alive today fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim.

The Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity had lived in Spain until they were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe.

They spoke a Spanish—Hebrew dialect, Ladino, and preserved their own traditions and religious rites. In the 1960s, the number of Sephardim was estimated at 500,000.

The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million. Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew.

WHY IS THE KHAZARIAN CONVERSION CONTROVERSIAL?

The reason that the Khazarian Conversion “Hypothesis” is controversial is because it weakens Zionist claims to the Holy Land.

Zionism is an ethno-nationalist ideology which justifies itself via a certain mythology which includes self-serving interpretations of certain passages of the Old Testament. In this mythology, Israel rightfully belongs to Jews because the Holy Land was promised to the Jewish people by God in the Torah. This is not true, but many Jews are very invested in this story, and it plays a key part in Jewish identitarianism.

After all, Jews are famous for believing that they alone are “God’s chosen people”, and take great pride in their heritage. If it were to be revealed that most European Jews are descended from converts, rather than from the ancient Israelites, it would surely come as a shock to those who believe that Jews have a special status conferred to them by God.

Most Jewish historians minimize the importance of the Khazarian Conversion, though they do not deny that it occurred.

If you would like to hear the arguments against the hypothesis that Ashkenanzi Jews are descended from Khazars, I refer you to the work of Dr. Henry Abramson and his YouTube channel, Jewish History Lab.

WHERE DO ASHKENAZI JEWS COME FROM?

There are two main theories about the origin of the Ashkenazi Jews. The first, which is known as the Rhineland Hypothesis, is favoured by professors with jobs. It holds that Ashkenazi Jews migrated into Franconia (now France) sometime after the “Roman exile” in 70 A.D. They gradually migrated into the Rhineland over the centuries and experienced a miraculous demographic increase which began sometime after the 13th century and continued for hundreds of years.

The Khazarian hypothesis is that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Jewish immigrants who left Khazaria after the collapse of its trading empire, which had controlled part of the famous Silk Road trade route.

What is not contested is that there was an Empire called Khazaria in the 7th to 10th century, and that the official state religion of this Empire was at least nominally Jewish.

The Khazar Empire was located on the North shore of the Black Sea, and touched upon the Caspian Sea as well, which was called the Khazar Sea.

The Khazarian Conversion was a historical event which is acknowledged by Jewish historians. To hear about it from a Jewish perspective, I again recommend the work of Dr. Henry Abramson. He has a whole bunch of videos which are specifically about the history of Jews in Khazaria.

WHO WAS ARTHUR KOESTLER?

If you don’t know who Arthur Koestler was, you should. He was one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century, and many critics consider his magnum opus Darkness At Noon one of the greatest novels of all time. For some reason, however, his legacy seems to have been memory-holed.

It is worth noting that Arthur Koestler was himself an Ashkenazi Jew. Born in Vienna, he became a journalist at the age of twenty. During the Spanish Civil War, which he covered from the Republican side, he was captured and imprisoned by the Nationalists for several months. He joined the Communist Party in 1931, but left in disillusionment in 1938.

In 1976, he published The Thirteenth Tribe, in which he advances the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people originating in and populating an empire north of and between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea.

Koestler's hypothesis is that the Khazars - who converted to Judaism in the 8th century - migrated westwards into current Eastern Europe (primarily Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Hungary and Germany) in the 12th and 13th centuries when the Khazar Empire was collapsing.

The Thirteenth Tribe was Koestler’s last major work, and in the same year it was published he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He mostly stopped writing, reportedly due to the trembling of his hands. In 1980, he allegedly committed suicide along with his wife, who apparently could not bear the thought of living without him.

His suicide note read:

To whom it may concern.

The purpose of this note is to make it unmistakably clear that I intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge or aid of any other person…

My reasons for deciding to put an end to my life are simple and compelling: Parkinson's disease and the slow-killing variety of leukaemia (CCI). I kept the latter a secret even from intimate friends to save them distress. After a more or less steady physical decline over the last years, the process has now reached an acute state with added complications which make it advisable to seek self-deliverance now, before I become incapable of making the necessary arrangements.

I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This "oceanic feeling" has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this.

What makes it nevertheless hard to take this final step is the reflection of the pain it is bound to inflict on my surviving friends, above all my wife Cynthia. It is to her that I owe the relative peace and happiness that I enjoyed in the last period of my life – and never before.

The note was dated June 1982. Below it appeared the following:

Since the above was written in June 1982, my wife decided that after thirty-four years of working together she could not face life after my death.

Further down the page appeared Cynthia's own farewell note:

“I fear both death and the act of dying that lies ahead of us. I should have liked to finish my account of working for Arthur – a story which began when our paths happened to cross in 1949. However, I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources.

Double suicide has never appealed to me, but now Arthur's incurable diseases have reached a stage where there is nothing else to do.”

After his death, mainstream media was awash about whether Koestler had pressured his impressionable wife, who was much younger than him, to kill herself out of some kind of twisted narcissism or something.

According to many reports, Koestler was abusive to women throughout his life. This may be part of the reason that there is somewhat of a dark cloud surrounding his literary legacy.

But what if he wrote that letter under coercion? After all, Danny Casolaro also wrote a suicide note, but no one believes he killed himself.

Some people believe Arthur Koestler was murdered by Zionists for undermining the pseudo-scriptural basis for the Jewish claim to Palestine. I do not know whether this is true, but I do know that a disproportionate number of the greatest political theorists of modern times, such as Max Weber, David Graeber, and Ted Kaczynski, have died under mysterious circumstances.

If Koestler was murdered by Zionists, the irony is brutal and sickening. In unearthing the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry, Koestler had intended to undermine the anti-semitism of the Nazis, whose racial theory held that Jewishness was some kind of heritable genetic condition, rather than a choice.

Both Christians and Muslims have traditionally believed that Jews could be cured of their Jewishness by conversion; the Nazis did not. The Nazis believed that anyone with a Jewish ancestor was Jewish, and therefore needed to be killed in order to Germany “Jewish Problem”. According to the Nazis, the fact I have a known Jewish ancestor makes me a Jew.

It is worth pointing out that this is insanely stupid. Jews have existed for thousands of years. The chances of anyone in Eurasia having zero Jewish ancestors is statistically ZERO. If the Nazis wished to rid the world of anyone with a single Jewish ancestor, they would need to exterminate the human race.

When you realize how racially-mixed human beings actually are, and how mutable cultures are, one conclusion is inescapable- racism truly is stupid. This was the point that Arthur Koestler was making in The Thirteenth Tribe, and for doing so, he may well have been killed by Zionists, the most racist people on the planet. The forces of stupidity are truly mighty.

The Thirteenth Tribe is a remarkable piece of scholarship, and it has very clearly stood the test of time. It is most assuredly not an anti-semitic text. Koestler clearly was well-intentioned, and he certainly was not an enemy of the Jewish people. Indeed, he was a Zionist in his younger years, though he grew also disillusioned with that movement.

To any Jews reading this, I implore you to read The Thirteenth Tribe. If you do not understand this chapter of Jewish history, you do not understand Jewish history.

THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE

Koestler begins:

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.

The country of the Khazars, a people of Turkish stock, occupied a strategic key position at the vital gateway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, where the great eastern powers of the period confronted each other.

It acted as a buffer protecting Byzantium against invasions by the lusty barbarian tribesmen of the northern steppes — Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, etc. — and, later, the Vikings and the Russians.

WAIT, WHAT? ARE YOU SAYING ASHKENAZI JEWS ARE TURKISH? BUT THEY’RE LIGHT-SKINNED!

The term “Turkic”, by the way, has historically applied to different ethnic groups, whose appearance might vary widely. Given that we are talking about the Caucasus region, there must surely have been many light-skinned subjects of the Khazar Empire, whose Eastern regions touched upon the vast Eurasian steppes, the land which has produced some of the fiercest tribes of warriors who has ever lived, including the Mongols and Huns.

[T]he Arab geographer Istakhri, one of the main Arab sources, has this to say:! ‘The Khazars do not resemble the Turks. They are black- haired, and are of two kinds, one called the Kara-Khazars [Black Khazars], who are swarthy verging on deep black as if they were a kind of Indian, and a white kind [Ak-Khazars], who are strikingly handsome.’

Koestler notes that both the word Turk and the word Hun seem to derive from Chinese terms for nomadic barbarians.

[The Huns] are of uncertain origin; their name is apparently derived from the Chinese Hiung-nu, which designates warlike nomads in general, while other nations applied the name Hun in a similarly indiscriminate way to nomadic hordes of all kinds, including the ‘White Huns’ mentioned above, the Sabirs, Magyars and Khazars.*

In the first century AD, the Chinese drove these disagreeable Hun neighbours westwards, and thus started one of those periodic avalanches which swept for many centuries from Asia towards the West.

From the fifth century onwards, many of these westward- bound tribes were called by the generic name of “Turks’. The term is also supposed to be of Chinese origin (apparently derived from the name of a hill) and was subsequently used to refer to all tribes who spoke languages with certain common characteristics — the ‘Turkic’ language group. Thus the term Turk, in the sense in which it was used by mediaeval writers — and often also by modern ethnologists — refers primarily to language and not to race. In this sense the Huns and Khazars were ‘Turkic’ people.

The origin of the name Khazar, and the modern derivations to which it gave rise, has also been the subject of much ingenious speculation. Most likely the word is derived from the Turkish root gaz, ‘to wander’, and simply means ‘nomad’.

So, it seems quite clear that the people of Khazaria were basically Central Asian barbarians who had recently become civilized.

Koestler notes that the terms “Turk”, “Hun”, and “barbarian” interchangeably by ancient historians, which has “led to much confusion in the interpretation of ancient sources.”

He concludes:

[T]he Khazars appeared on the European scene about the middle of the fifth century as a people under Hunnish sovereignty, and may be regarded, together with the Magyars and other tribes, as a later offspring of Attila’s horde.

SO THE KHAZARS WERE TURKS… AND ANCIENT TURKS WERE HUNS WHO HAD BEEN EXPELLED FROM CHINA?

Yeah, that’s the gist of it, but I want to remind my kind readers that all of this happened a long time ago. There were tons of different tribes in that part of the world over the centuries, and many of them were nomadic horse-mounted warriors who were always moving around and fighting each other.

Plus, the “raping” part of “raping and pillaging” wasn’t a figure of speech back then. Back in those days, rape meant rape, and was responsible for a ton of racial mixing. The reasonable conclusion to draw is that all peoples of Eurasia are racially mixed. In any case, Khazaria was a heterogenous mosaic of many different cultures.

Koestler explains:

The ‘real Khazars’ who ruled it were probably always a minority — as the Austrians were in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

That the Khazars were Turks, however, seems to have been convincingly proven. There is even one case of a Khazar king writing in Turkic runes.

Khazar kings, by the way, were called “Khagans”, which almost certainly derives from the same root as “Khan” as in “Genghis Khan”. The Khazaria Empire is referred to both as a “Kingdom” and a “Khaganate”, because the words “king” and “khagan” are basically synonyms.

The author continues:

The collapse of the Hun Empire after Attila’s death left a power-vacuum in Eastern Europe, through which, once more, wave after wave of nomadic hordes swept from east to west, prominent among them the Uigurs and Avars. The Khazars during most of this period seemed to be happily occupied with raiding the rich trans-Caucasian regions of Georgia and Armenia and collecting precious plunder. During the second half of the sixth century they became the dominant force among the tribes north of the Caucasus.

THE BYZANTINE ALLIANCE

A new triangle of powers replaced the previous one: the Islamic Caliphate; Christian Byzantium; and the newly emerged Khazar Kingdom of the North.

It fell to the latter to bear the brunt of the Arab attack in its initial stages, and to protect the plains of Eastern Europe from the invaders.

One wonders, in fact, if the Byzantines were using the Khazars as a buffer between themselves and the Arab Caliphate, which at that time was in its ascendancy. Koestler notes that although the Caucasus mountains were “a formidable natural obstacle”, they did not present an insurmountable challenge to invaders. It also seems possible that the Byzantines would have preferred not to be next-door to the nomadic barbarians of Central Asia. It is certainly plausible that the Byzantines helped make the Khazar Empire what it was, given how important the Silk Road was to international trade at that point in history.

At one point prior to 720 A.D., the Byzantine Emperor even offered the Khazar Khagan his daughter’s hand in marriage, at which point the Khazar leader pledged an army of forty thousand horsemen.

A historian named Gibbon records:

After a sumptuous banquet, [the Byzantine Emperor] presented [the Khagan] with the plate and ornaments, the gold, the gems and the silk which had been used at the Imperial table and, with his own hand, distributed rich jewels and earrings to his new allies. In a secret interview, he produced the portrait of his daughter Eudocia, condescended to flatter the barbarian with the promise of a fair and august bride, and obtained an immediate succour of forty thousand horses.

Eudocia (or Epiphania) was the only daughter of Heraclius by his first wife. The promise to give her in marriage to the “Turk’ indicates once more the high value set by the Byzantine Court on the Khazar alliance.

THE ARAB-KHAZAR WAR

Unfortunately for the Khagan, the Emperor’s daughter died en route to Khazaria, but nevertheless, the Byzantine-Khazar alliance seems to have been advantageous for both parties.

The Byzantine diplomatic mission certainly paid rich dividends, as the Khazars fended off multiple attempted invasions of the Caucausus.

And the Khazars appear to have gained both territory and prestige.

At one stage during these fifteen years of fighting, the Khazars overran Georgia and Armenia, inflicted a total defeat on the Arab army in the battle of Ardabil (AD 730) ...

The next year, Maslamah ibn-Abd-al-Malik, most famed Arab general of his time, who had formerly commanded the siege of Constantinople, took Balanjar and even got as far as Samandar, another large Khazar town further north. But once more the invaders were unable to establish a permanent garrison, and once more they were forced to retreat across the Caucasus. The sigh of relief experienced in the Roman Empire assumed a tangible form through another dynastic alliance, when the heir to the throne was married to a Khazar princess, whose son was to rule Byzantium as Leo the Khazar.

THE KHAGAN CONVERTS TO ISLAM… FOR ABOUT FIVE MINUTES

The Arabs were not a spent force, however, and eventually launched a surprise attack which caused the Khazars to retreat back as far as the Volga River.

The Kagan was forced to ask for terms; Marwan, in accordance with the routine followed in other conquered countries, requested the Kagan’s conversion to the True Faith. The Kagan complied, but his conversion to Islam must have been an act of lip-service, for no more is heard of the episode in the Arab or Byzantine sources — in contrast to the lasting effects of the establishment of Judaism as the state religion which took place a few years later.

The author quotes a historian named Artamonov, who says:

Khazaria was the first feudal state in Eastern Europe, which ranked with the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Caliphate ... It was only due to the powerful Khazar attacks, diverting the tide of the Arab armies to the Caucasus, that Byzantium withstood them...

He also quotes a Russian historian named Dimitry Obolensky, who declares:

‘The main contribution of the Khazars to world history was their success in holding the line of the Caucasus against the northward onslaught of the Arabs.’

In other words, the Khazarian alliance with the Byzantine Empire is crucial to understanding the ascendancy of the Khazar Empire. I am guessing that the Khazars, who were originally barbarians, were not particularly literate, and likely learned some tricks of the imperial trade from Byzantine merchants, some of whom might have happened to be Jewish.

I suspect that the Khazarian conversion occurred because Jews from Byzantium gained influence at the Khazar court, perhaps because the non-literate Khazars employed Jews as scribes.

It is also likely that Jewish merchants, who were likely connected to Byzantine trade networks, exerted considerable influence in Khazaria. After all, Byzantium was then one of the commercial capitals of the world, and the Silk Road was one of the most important trade routes in the world. If you put two and two together, it seems undeniable that the Byzantines would have had considerable business interests in Khazaria.

WHY WOULD ANYONE CONVERT TO JUDAISM?

‘The religion of the Hebrews,’ writes Bury, ‘had exercised a profound influence on the creed of Islam, and it had been a basis for Christianity; it had won scattered proselytes; but the conversion of the Khazars to the undiluted religion of Jehova is unique in history.’

In researching this article, I was watched a lot of videos made by Jewish historians. Even they seem astonished that Turkic barbarians would convert to Judaism. Why would anyone convert to Judaism? Why would anyone choose Judaism, the world’s foremost non-universalist religion, over Christianity and Islam, which seem to offer more attractive visions of the afterlife?

To a non-Jew, the main appeal of Judaism seems to be the belief that the Jews are “God’s chosen people”, and therefore special. Jews are also famously loyal to the cultural tradition that produced the Hebrew alphabet, arguably one of the greatest inventions in history. Other than that, the advantages of Judaism seem to be mostly socioeconomic and political.

Even Jewish scholars seem to think that the Khazarian conversion had more to do with political considerations than with spiritual ones, but I would like to point out that as the Khazars transitioned from barbarism to civilization that they may have become convinced that they needed a new religion.

The Khazars traditionally practiced a shamanic religion called Tengrism, which was likely to similar to that of the Mongols, Huns, and other central Asian nomads. Shamanic religions tend to be anarchistic, which is not optimal for a bureaucratic society in which moral authority is placed in the hands of state functionaries. The Khazars may have adopted Judaism because it is better suited to the administration of an empire than animism is.

DID KING BULAN CONVERT TO JUDAISM TO SAVE HIS OWN LIFE?

We should not underestimate self-interest as a driving force for religious conversion. It is useful to know, for instance, that the Khazars practiced divine regicide, which was common in the ancient world.

After noting that “there is no evidence of the Khazars in religious persecution, either before or after the conversion to Judaism”, Koestler notes that they “preserved some barbaric rituals from their tribal past.”

He quotes a historian named Ibn Fadlan, who claimed:

‘The period of the king’s rule is forty years. If he exceeds this time by a single day, his subjects and attendants kill him, saying: “His reasoning is already dimmed, and his insight confused”.

He then quotes another source, Istakhri:

When they wish to enthrone this Kagan, they put a silken cord round his neck and tighten it until he begins to choke. Then they ask him: ‘How long doest thou intend to rule?’ If he does not die before that year, he is killed when he reaches it.

Although this may seem barbaric, we are talking about barbarians. Regicide was a common practice in ancient times, as shown by the great English scholar James Frazer in The Golden Bough. When one considers the risk posed by aged rulers holding onto power as their cognitive faculties decline, the custom seems both prudent and wise.

In fact, Frazer wrote an essay entitled The Killing of the Khazar Kings, which was specifically about the Khazar custom of regicide. But I digress.

It seems possible that the Khagan king may have been influenced to convert to Judaism in order to prevent himself from being killed by his own people, but this is speculation.

But perhaps I am overcomplicating things. The simplest explanation is simply that Jews seized control of the Khazar state in a coup-d’etat.

[Artamonov] suggests that the acceptance of Judaism as the state religion was the result of a coup d’état, which at the same time reduced the Kagan, descendant of a pagan dynasty whose allegiance to Mosaic law could not really be trusted, to a mere figurehead. This is a hypothesis as good as any other — and with as little evidence to support it.

THE KHAZARIAN CONVERSION AS REALPOLITIK

Koestler is of the opinion that the Khazarian Conversion occurred primarily for geopolitical reasons.

What was the motivation of this unique event? It is not easy to get under the skin of a Khazar prince… But if we reason in terms of power-politics, which obeys essentially the same rules throughout the ages, a fairly plausible analogy offers itself.

At the beginning of the eighth century the world was polarized between the two super-powers representing Christianity and Islam. Their ideological doctrines were welded to power-politics pursued by the classical methods of propaganda, subversion and military conquest. The Khazar Empire represented a Third Force, which had proved equal to either of them, both as an adversary and an ally. But it could only maintain its independence by accepting neither Christianity nor Islam — for either choice would have automatically subordinated it to the authority of the Roman Emperor or the Caliph of Baghdad.

There had been no lack of efforts by either court to convert the Khazars to Christianity or Islam, but all they resulted in was the exchange of diplomatic courtesies, dynastic inter-marriages and shifting military alliances based on mutual self-interest. Relying on its military strength, the Khazar kingdom, with its hinterland of vassal tribes, was determined to preserve its position as the Third Force, leader of the uncommitted nations of the steppes.

In other words, the Khazars at this point were the hot girl at the dance. Two of the most powerful empires in the world were actively courting them. Yet choosing either would win not only a powerful ally, but also a powerful enemy. It was both a predicament and a golden opportunity.

At the same time, their intimate contacts with Byzantium and the Caliphate had taught the Khazars that their primitive shamanism was not only barbaric and outdated compared to the great monotheistic creeds, but also unable to confer on the leaders the spiritual and legal authority which the rulers of the two theocratic world powers, the Caliph and the Emperor, enjoyed. Yet the conversion to either creed would have meant submission, the end of independence, and thus would have defeated its purpose. What could have been more logical than to embrace a third creed, which was uncommitted towards either of the two, yet represented the venerable foundation of both?

Koestler quotes a historian named Bury, who explains:

“There can be no question that the ruler was actuated by political motives in adopting Judaism. To embrace Mohammadanism would have made him the spiritual dependent of the Caliphs, who attempted to press their faith on the Khazars, and in Christianity lay the danger of his becoming an ecclesiastical vassal of the Roman Empire. Judaism was a reputable religion with sacred books which both Christian and Mohammadan respected; it elevated him above the heathen barbarians, and secured him against the interference of Caliph or Emperor. But he did not adopt, along with circumcision, the intolerance of the Jewish cult. He allowed the mass of his people to abide in their heathendom and worship their idols.”

It is worth mentioning at this point that both Christianity and Islam had official policies of tolerance towards Jews during this time period, whereas practitioners of shamanism would have likely been seen as devil-worshipping infidels.

The Christian policy of tolerance for the Jewish religion is known as the Doctrine of Witness, and has been Church Doctrine since the time of Saint Augustine. The Muslim equivalent is called the Pact of Umar.

By choosing to convert to Judaism, the Khazars were exempting themselves from both religious persecution, as well as attempts at evangelism by both Christians and Muslims. It was a genius move.

Even Jewish historians seem to doubt the sincerity of the Khazarian conversion, and there are even some who dispute that it ever even occurred. What is clear is that Khazaria became nominally Jewish sometime around 720 A.D. What is not clear is what percentage of Khazars actually observed Judaism, which kind of Judaism they practiced, and so on. The general attitude seems to be that it was a “court conversion”, in which members of the ruling class convert, whereas commoners continue practicing the customs of their ancestors. It is very hard to convince people to give up their traditional beliefs, and I have seen no evidence that such efforts were made.

As Koestler puts it:

Though the Khazar court’s conversion was no doubt politically motivated, it would still be absurd to imagine that they embraced overnight, blindly, a religion whose tenets were unknown to them.

THE TALE OF KING BULAN

The Khazarian Conversion happened under the reign of a ruler named Bulan, also known as Sabriel. He may have been married to a Jewish woman named Serach. Although this is disputed by scholars, it would certainly make sense.

The story of Bulan’s conversion is one for the ages.

The circumstances of the conversion are obscured by legend, but the principal Arab and Hebrew accounts of it have some basic features in common.

Al-Masudi’s account of the Jewish rule in Khazaria, quoted earlier on, ends with a reference to a previous work of his, in which he gave a description of those circumstances. That previous work of Masudi’s is lost; but there exist two accounts which are based on the lost book.

The first, by Dimaski (written in 1327), reiterates that at the time of Harun al Rashid, the Byzantine Emperor forced the Jews to emigrate; these emigrants came to the Khazar country where they found ‘an intelligent but uneducated race to whom they offered their religion. The natives found it better than their own and accepted it.’

In a footnote, Koestler adds:

No other source, as far as I know, mentions this. It may be a substitution more palatable to Muslim readers for the Kagan’s short-lived adoption of Islam prior to Judaism.

He then proceeds to contradict himself by mentioning a second Muslim source which states that the Khagan first converted to Christianity, then Islam.

The second, much more detailed account is in al-Bakri’s Book of Kingdoms and Roads (eleventh century):

The reason for the conversion to Judaism of the King of the Khazars, who had previously been a pagan, is as follows. He had adopted Christianity. Then he recognized its falsehood and discussed this matter, which greatly worried him, with one of his high officials. The latter said to him: “O King, those in possession of sacred scriptures fall into three groups. Summon them and ask them to state their case, then follow the one who is in possession of the truth.”

So he sent to the Christians for a Bishop. Now there was with the King a Jew, skilled in argument, who engaged him in disputation. He asked the Bishop: ‘What do you say of Moses, the son of Amran, and the Torah which was revealed to him?’ The Bishop replied: ‘Moses is a prophet and the Torah speaks the truth.’ Then the Jew said to the King: ‘He has already admitted the truth of my creed. Ask him now what he believes in.’ So the King asked him and he replied: ‘I say that Jesus the Messiah is the son of Mary, he is the Word, and he has revealed the mysteries in the name of God.’ Then said the Jew to the King of the Khazars: ‘He preaches a doctrine which I know not, while he accepts my propositions.’ But the Bishop was not strong in producing evidence. Then the King asked for a Muslim, and they sent him a scholarly, clever man who was good at arguments. But the Jew hired someone who poisoned him on the journey, and he died. And the Jew succeeded in winning the King for his faith, so that he embraced Judaism.

When you read things like this, you start to understand why this area of history is somewhat of a no-go zone. Clearly, Muslim historians were biased against Jews, as were Christians. Many Jews would likely find the above passage shockingly racist, and it may well be. If al-Bakri’s account is false, it is horrifically racist. But what if it’s true? Is it racist if it’s true?

It is worth noting that history records the name of the rabbi who made the case for Judaism: Yitzhak ha-Sangari.

According to Wikipedia:

Yitzhak ha-Sangari was the rabbi who purportedly converted the Khazar royalty to Judaism, according to medieval Jewish sources. According to D. M. Dunlop, "the name Isaac Sangari is perhaps not attested before the 13th century, when he is mentioned by Nahmanides."

In any case, Bulan defended. His successor was named Obadiah, and until the Khazar Empire was crushed by Rus in the 13th century, Khazaria appears to have been ruled by Jews. It is worth noting that Obadiah *may* have been the son of Bulan’s Jewish wife, which would mean that he met the rabbinical definition of “Jew”.

I bring this up because many people claim that Ashkenazi Jews are not “real Jews” because they are descended from converts.

That begs the question “What is a Jew?” If you are interested in this question, which is notoriously tricky, I refer you to the following two articles.

WAS BULAN’S WIFE JEWISH?

Claims that Bulan’s wife was Jewish date back to a single source, known as the Schechter Letter, which was unearthed in 1912.

Wikipedia explains:

In the Schechter Letter, Serach (Hebrew: סרח) is the wife of the Khazar ruler [Bulan]. A Jew, she encourages her husband and other Khazars to convert to Judaism and establish it as the official religion of Khazaria. Serach is not mentioned in the Khazar Correspondence or the Kuzari.

Some scholars have postulated that the Khazar conversion to Judaism came as a result of contact with existing Jewish populations in the Crimea and the Caucasus, possibly the ancestors of the Krymchaks or Mountain Jews. As with so much of Khazar studies, the absence of documentary evidence renders the question of whether Serach belonged to one of these groups a matter of speculation.

So, was Obadiah’s mother Jewish? We may never know, but it would make sense, wouldn’t?

If she was, that means that he would be “born to a Jewish mother”, which is the rabbinical definition of a Jew.

NO, ASHKENAZI JEWS AREN’T “FAKE JEWS”. HERE’S WHY.

Part of the reason that scholarship has been stunted vis-a-vis Khazaria is because some people insist that Ashkenazi Jews are not “real Jews”. But the Khazarian conversion does not prove this at all. If by “real Jews”, one means “Jews who maintain an unbroken spiritual lineage dating back to ancient Israel”, there were indeed “real Jews” in Khazaria.

Many of these Jews were likely professional scribes. The Khazar Empire was a trading empire which ruled a vast territory. Although the use of Turkic runes cited above suggests that the Khazars had a written language, there is no way that they were as literate as Jews were. It stands to reason that Jews gained power and influence in the Khazarian court due to their literacy. By the 10th century, the Khazars were using the Hebrew alphabet.

As they say, the pen is mightier than the sword. In the partnership between the Khazars and Jews, it seems likely that the Khazars wielded the sword while the Jews wielded the pen.

After the Khazarian Conversion, the Khaganate continued its long-held policy of religious tolerance, which attracted many Jews to Khazaria.

Persecution in varied forms had started with Justinian I (527-65), and assumed particularly vicious forms under Heraclius in the seventh century, Leo III in the eighth, Basil and Leo IV in the ninth, Romanus in the tenth. Thus Leo III, who ruled during the two decades immediately preceding the Khazar conversion to Judaism, ‘attempted to end the anomaly [of the tolerated status of Jews] at one blow, by ordering all his Jewish subjects to be baptized’.
Although the implementation of the order seemed to have been rather ineffective, it led to the flight of a considerable number of Jews from Byzantium. Masudi relates:

“In this city [Khazaran-Itil] are Muslims, Christians, Jews and pagans. The Jews are the king, his attendants and the Khazars of his kind. The king of the Khazars had already become a Jew in the Caliphate of Harun al-Rashidt and he was joined by Jews from all lands of Islam and from the country of the Greeks [Byzantium]. Indeed the king of the Greeks at the present time, the Year of the Hegira 332 has converted the Jews in his kingdom to Christianity by coercion... Thus many Jews took flight from the country of the Greeks to Khazaria.”

To be clear, there were Jews in Khazaria before the conversion, belonging to different traditions, including a sect known as the Karaites. But their numbers were likely bolstered by Jewish immigrants from Byzantium, as well as the Balkans and Asia Minor.

As Koestler puts it:

[The Khazars] had been well acquainted with Jews and their religious observances for at least a century before the conversion, through the continued influx of refugees from religious persecution in Byzantium, and to a lesser extent from countries in Asia Minor conquered by the Arabs.

So, for those people who wish to believe that only Jews who belong to an unbroken lineage are “real Jews”, it seems that there was no shortage of “real Jews” in Khazaria, even if the original conversion included only the elites.

For the record, I think that debates about who is and who isn’t a “real Jew” are for stupid people who don’t understand ethnology. If you feel you are Jewish and are accepted by a community that identifies as Jewish, you are Jewish so far as they are concerned. Isn’t that what matters? As the saying goes: “It’s not who you claim, but who claims you.”

If being Jewish is important to you, fine. But you shouldn’t feel challenged when presented with historical facts. I’m not attacking anyone’s identity. Identities are concepts which exist in people’s minds. You can attack people, but you can’t attack an identity.

In any case, Khazaria attracted Jewish immigrants after the conversion, so we can deduce that modern Ashkenazi are indeed descended from “real Jews”, as well from Khazars.

We know that Khazaria was a relatively civilized country among the Barbarians of the North, yet not committed to either of the militant creeds, and so it became a natural haven for the periodic exodus of Jews under Byzantine rule, threatened by forced conversion and other pressures.

WHAT ABOUT THE KHAZAR CORRESPONDENCE?

If you have looked into the Khazarian hypothesis at all, you have probably heard of the Khazar Correspondence, which I have ignored until now. It is an interesting collection of documents, but it tells us much more about Sephardic Jews than about the Khazars.

The Khazar Correspondence is a set of documents, which are alleged to date from the 950s or 960s, and to be letters between Hasdai ibn Shaprut, foreign secretary to the Caliph of Cordoba (in modern-day Spain), and Joseph Khagan of the Khazars. The Correspondence is one of only a few documents attributed to a Khazar author, and potentially one of only a small number of primary sources on Khazar history.

The authenticity of the correspondence has been challenged, on the grounds that it has little in common with the otherwise attested chronology, language, borders and economy of the Khazars at the time.

Koestler explains:

The exchange of letters apparently took place after 954 and before 961, that is roughly at the time when Masudi wrote. To . appreciate its significance a word must be said about the person- ality of Hasdai Ibn Shaprut - perhaps the most brilliant figure in the ‘Golden Age’ (900-1200) of the Jews in Spain.

In 929, Abd-al-Rahman III, a member of the Omayad dynasty, succeeded in unifying the Moorish possessions in the southern and central parts of the Iberian peninsula under his rule, and founded the Western Caliphate. His capital, Cordoba, became the glory of Arab Spain, and a focal centre of European culture — with a library of 400,000 catalogued volumes. Hasdai, born 910 in Cordoba into a distinguished Jewish family, first attracted the Caliph’s attention as a medical practitioner with some remarkable cures to his credit. Abd-al-Rahman appointed him his court physician, and trusted his judgement so completely that Hasdai was called upon, first, to put the state finances in order, then to act as Foreign Minister and diplomatic trouble-shooter in the new Caliphate’s complex dealings with Byzantium.

He obviously was an enlightened, yet a devoted Jew, who used his diplomatic contacts to gather information about the Jewish communities dispersed in various parts of the world, and to intervene on their behalf whenever possible. He was particularly concerned about the persecution of Jews in the Byzantine Empire…

According to his own account, Hasdai first heard of the existence of an independent Jewish kingdom from some merchant traders from Khurasan in Persia; but he doubted the truth of their story. Later he questioned the members of a Byzantine diplomatic mission to Cordoba, and they confirmed the merchants’ account, contributing a considerable amount of factual detail about the Khazar kingdom, including the name — Joseph - of its present King.

Thereupon Hasdai decided to send couriers with a letter to King Joseph. The letter (which will be discussed in more detail later on) contains a list of questions about the Khazar state, its people, method of government, armed forces, and so on — including an inquiry to which of the twelve tribes Joseph belonged.

This seems to indicate that Hasdai thought the Jewish Khazars to hail from Palestine — as the Spanish Jews did — and perhaps even to represent one of the Lost Tribes.

Hasdai tried to send to a delegation to Khazaria to deliver this letter, but upon arriving in Byzantium, they were prevented by Byzantine authorities from continuing on to Khazaria. It seems likely that the delegation decided to try the “Let’s not and say we did” approach, and forged a response to Hasdai in the name of the Khazar King Joseph. The Khazar Correspondence therefore tells us more about the attitude of Spanish Jews about the Khazars than about the Khazars themselves.

The most notable part of the Khazar Correspondence concerns genealogy.

“We have found in the family registers of our fathers,’ Joseph asserts boldly, ‘that Togarma had ten sons, and the names of their offspring are as follows: Uigur, Dursu, Avars, Huns, Basilii, Tarniakh, Khazars, Zagora, Bulgars, Sabir. We are the sons of Khazar, the seventh…”

This is interesting because it suggests that the Sephardic Jews suspected that the Khazars were descended from Noah’s third son Japheth, or more precisely, Togarma, the ancestor of all Turkish tribes.

The word “Ashenazi” comes from a place-name in the Bible, but there is no consensus amongst scholars as to its location. The leading theory seems to be that it was somewhere in the Caucausus.

WHAT ABOUT MAGOG?

The Khazars have often been associated with Gog and Magog, two Biblical names of ill repute. Why is this?

According to Biblical tradition, Togarma was the nephew of Magog, the second son of Japheth. According to the Book of Ezekiel, the pagan Magog people live "north of the World", and metaphorically represent the forces of Evil. The Roman-Jewish historian Josephus held that Magog was the progenitor of the Scythians.

It seems undeniable that the Khazars would have mixed with the Scythians over the centuries, making it likely that the Khazars are partly descended from Magog.

WERE KHAZARS SEMITES?

This has some interesting implications, because the genealogy of Khazars is being traced to Japheth, rather than Shem, to whom all Semitic peoples trace their ancestry.

So were the Khazars Semites? No, they were not.

Are Ashkenazi Jews descended from Semites? Yes, they are, because every single human being in Eurasia or Africa almost certainly has at least some Semitic ancestry. The further back in time you go, the more ancestors you have. And whether you believe in the Great Flood (now known as the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis) there were a lot less people on planet Earth five thousand years ago. Every human being on Earth is related to every other human being on Earth. That’s a big part of why racism is so dumb.

SO WHAT BECAME OF THE KHAZAR EMPIRE?

The Khazar Empire eventually succumbed, as all empires do, to a combination of internal and external pressures. This article is already long enough, so I won’t go into detail. Look it up if you’re interested.

Eventually, the Khazars were crushed by Vikings. You weren’t expecting that, were you?

I had no idea about this, but the Vikings travelled by river from Scandinavia all the way to the Black and Caspian Seas, raping and pillaging as they went.

The Vikings, who were known as the Rus, established a capital in Kiev, which may have originally been a Khazar settlement.

By 965, the Prince of Kiev was counselling the region’s Slavonic tribes to “Pay nothing to the Khazars!” Given that Khazaria was a trade empire which charged a 10% tax on all goods coming through their territory, this probably marked the beginning of the end for the Khazar state, which vanishes from history sometime around the year 1200.

WHAT BECAME OF THE KHAZARS?

After the fall of the Khazarian state, the Khazarians vanish from history. Presumably, most people were absorbed into that state’s successors. Others probably relocated, as people tend to do.

As Wikipedia puts it:

Where the Khazars dispersed after the fall of the Empire is subject to many conjectures. Proposals have been made regarding the possibility of a Khazar factor in the ethnogenesis of numerous peoples, such as the Hazaras, Hungarians, the Kazakhs, the Cossacks of the Don region and of Ukraine, the Muslim Kumyks, the Turkic-speaking Krymchaks and their Crimean neighbours the Crimean Karaites, the Moldavian Csángós, the Mountain Jews, even some Subbotniks (on the basis of their Ukrainian and Cossack origin and others).^[20][21][22]

The question that is of most interest to historians is what became of the Khazarian Jews. Presumably, they didn’t stop being Jewish after the Fall of the Empire. It stands to reason that they would have relocated to another region, as Jews have tended to do throughout history.

What is in dispute is the fate of the Jewish Khazars after the destruction of their empire, in the twelfth or thirteenth century. On this problem the sources are scant, but various late mediaeval Khazar settlements are mentioned in the Crimea, in the Ukraine, in Hungary, Poland and Lithuania. The general picture that emerges from these fragmentary pieces of information is that of a migration of Khazar tribes and communities into those regions of Eastern Europe — mainly Russia and Poland - where, at the dawn of the Modern Age, the greatest concentrations of Jews were found. This has led several historians to conjecture that a substantial part, and perhaps the majority, of eastern Jews - and hence of world Jewry — might be of Khazar, and not of Semitic origin.

Some researchers, such as the Israeli geneticist Eran Elhaik, argue convincingly that Khazarian Jews did indeed migrate to Western Europe in the 15th Century.

He has a YouTube channel, which I highly recommend.

Indeed, I believe that he has settled the matter by contrasting the Khazarian hypothesis with the mainstream view, which is called the Rhineland hypothesis.

WHEN THE RHINELAND HYPOTHESIS IS COMPARED TO THE KHAZARIAN HYPOTHESIS, IT IS ABUNDANTLY CLEAR WHICH IS TRUE AND WHICH IS FALSE

Simply put, the Khazarian Hypothesis is far more compelling than the Rhineland Hypothesis, and I believe that people who promote the Rhineland Hypothesis are doing so for political and ideological reasons.

Indeed, I see no reason to go into detail on this point, because the truth is easy to figure out. All one must do is compare the relative merits of the two theories, which Eran Elhaik has done. The Khazarian Hypothesis is parsimonious, logical, and reasonable. The Rhineland Hypothesis is not.

If you wish to compare the two theories, I recommend watching the following video.

So there you have it, folks. Ashkenazi Jews originally came from the Caucasus, which explains why they are white.

As Noam Chomsky said of the Khazarian hypothesis:

“It’s not anti-semitic. It’s a question of fact. If my ancestors from the Ukraine have Khazar roots, it changes nothing. I’m Jewish, my grandfather was Jewish… it makes no difference to our identity.”