Debate on European Jews’ Origin Settled? Koestler’s Khazarian Theory Vindicated !

• Modern Ashkenazi Jews (90+% of modern Jewry) are not semitic and not the biological descendents of the 12 tribes of Israel.
  –
  Mr. Benjamin Freedman, a Jewish industrialist born in New York, wrote in the Economic Council Letter published there of October 15 1947: “These Eastern European Jews have neither a racial nor a historic connection with Palestine. Their ancestors were not inhabitants of the Promised Land. They are the direct descendants of the people of the Khazar Kingdom. The Khazars were a non-Semitic, Turko-Mongolian tribe.” Mr. Freedman was challenged, unwisely, by a Zionist objector; he invited his challenger to go with him to the Jewish room of the New York Public Library. There they could together examine the Jewish Encyclopedia volume I pp. 1-12, and the published works of Graetz, Dubnow, Friedlander, Raisin and many other noted Jewish historians, which, as well as other non-Jewish authorities, “establish the fact beyond all possible doubt”.’
  ~ Somewhere South of Suez (1950) pp349-350.”
  –
• See also:
  –
  Ashkenazis ‘Self Styled’ Jews Are NOT the Descendants of the Ancient Israelites!
  Benjamin Freedman: Ashkenazi Khazars Self Style “Jews” Are Not Semitic And Not The Biological Descendents of The 12 Tribes of Israel !
  The 13th Tribe of Khazaria! Ashkenazi Khazars Are Not The Jews of The Bible!
  Modern Ashkenazi Jews are not the Jews of the Bible!
  New Genetic Research Confirms Koestler’s “Khazar” Theory! Ashkenazi Jews Are Not The Jews of The Bible !
  Ashkenazi Jews are Turkic Khazars! They Are Not The Israelites of The Bible! Not The Biological Descendents of The 12 Tribes of Israel !

• In the book The Thirteenth Tribe, Ashkenazi Jew Arthur Koestler documented the history (emphasis mine):
  –
  Mr. Koestler concludes: “The evidence presented in the 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. The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently westerly direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland and thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented mass settlement in Poland came into being, there were simply not enough Jews around in the west to account for it, while in the east a whole nation was on the move to new frontiers” ( page 179, page 180).
  –
  “The Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity had lived in Spain (in Hebrew Sepharad) until they were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in the countries bordering 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 500000.
  –
  The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million. Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew.” In Mr. Koestler’s own words, “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.”
  –
• Debate on European Jews’ origin settled? 
  by AFP, http://www.ynetnews.com/ 
  Gene study says Jews of European descent are mix of ancestries, with many hailing from tribes in Caucasus who converted to Judaism and created empire that lasted half a millennium
  –
  Jews of European origin are a mix of ancestries, with many hailing from tribes in the Caucasus who converted to Judaism and created an empire that lasted half a millennium, according to a gene study. The investigation, its author says, should settle a debate that has been roiling for more than two centuries.
  –
  Jews of European descent, often called Ashkenazim, account for some 90% of the more than 13 million Jews in the world today. According to the so-called Rhineland Hypothesis, Ashkenazim descended from Jews who progressively fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest of 638 AD. 
  –
  They settled in southern Europe and then, in the late Middle Ages, about 50,000 of them moved from the Rhineland in Germany into eastern Europe, according to the hypothesis. But detractors say this idea is implausible.
  –
  Barring a miracle – which some supporters of the Rhineland Hypothesis have in fact suggested – the scenario would have been demographically impossible. It would mean that the population of Eastern European Jews leapt from 50,000 in the 15th century to around eight million at the start of the 20th century. 
  –
  That birth rate would have been 10 times greater than that of the local non-Jewish population. And it would have occurred despite economic hardship, disease, wars and pogroms that ravaged Jewish communities.
  –
  Seeking new light in the argument, a study published in the British journal Genome Biology and Evolution, compares the genomes of 1,287 unrelated individuals who hail from eight Jewish and 74 non-Jewish populations. 
  –
  Geneticist Eran Elhaik of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, trawled through this small mountain of data in search of single changes in the DNA code that are linked to a group’s geographical origins. Such telltales have been used in past research to delve into the origins of the Basque people and the pygmy people of central Africa. 
  –
  Among European Jews, Elhaik found ancestral signatures that pointed clearly to the Caucasus and also, but to a smaller degree, the Middle East. The results, said Elhaik, give sound backing for the rival theory – the “Khazarian Hypothesis.”
  –
  Backed by archaeological findings
  Under this concept, eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars, a hotchpotch of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries AD and, influenced by Jews from Palestine, converted to Judaism in the 8th century. The Judeo-Khazars built a flourishing empire, drawing in Jews from Mesopotamia and imperial Byzantium. They became so successful that they sent offshoots into Hungary and Romania, planting the seeds of a great Diaspora.
  –
  But Khazaria collapsed in the 13th century when it was attacked by the Mongols and became weakened by outbreaks of the Black Death. The Judeo-Khazars fled westwards, settling in the rising Polish Kingdom and in Hungary, where their skills in finance, economics and politics were in demand, and eventually spread to central and western Europe, according to the “Khazarian Hypothesis.” 
  –
  “We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaised Khazars, Greco-Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews and Judeans,” says Elhaik. “Their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga, with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan.”
  –
  Many things are unknown about the Khazars, whose tribal confederation gathered Slavs, Scythians, Hunnic-Bulgars, Iranians, Alans and Turks. But, argues Elhaik, the tale sketched in the genes is backed by archaeological findings, by Jewish literature that describes the Khazars’ conversion to Judaism, and by language, too. 
  –
  “Yiddish, the language of Central and Eastern European Jews, began as a Slavic language” before being reclassified as High German, he notes. Another pointer is that European Jews and their ancestral groups in the Caucasus and Middle East share a relatively high risk of diseases such as cystic fibrosis. 
  –
  The investigation should help fine-tune a fast-expanding branch of genomics, which looks at single-change DNA mutations that are linked with inherited disease, adds Elhaik.

end