Part 2

/u/popper

The New Jewish Encyclopedia moves on to say that Khazarian “Jews” spread across Europe, and some moved to places like Poland.

“During that early period Jews seemed to have enjoyed a privileged status, evidenced from current tales about a Jewish king in Poland, and from the fact that some polish coins had Hebrew inscriptions.”

Those people, we are told, also had a powerful influence in places like Romania and Russia in the 8th century and beyond.

“Jews came to Russia as early as the 9th century from the kingdom of the Khazars, and later from Crimea, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Galicia, and Bessarabia, which had at different periods been under Russian rule.”

Sad to say, much of the modern Jewish literature, with a few exceptions, do not cite standard reference work or primary sources when it comes to dealing with this very specific issue. A classic representative of this would be Steven T. Katz.

Instead of looking at works such as the Jewish Encyclopedia and interacting with the serious argument, Katz argues that the Khazar theory “has been an influential theme among American anti-Semites since the immigration restrictionists of the 1920s…”

Katz—who believes that “the word ‘genocide,’ if correctly understood, could be applied only to the travail of European Jewry in World War I”—briefly mentioned Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe.

Yet Katz never pointed out that the Jewish Encyclopedia was published one year after Koestler was born, which is to say that Katz should have dealt with the arguments presented in that reference work first! Sadly, he never did. Therefore it is a categorical and historical mistake to postulate that Koestler was the progenitor of the Khazarian theory. He just popularized it.

In the old Jewish Encyclopedia, which provides a lengthy bibliography, we read in part:

“According to A. Harkavy (“Meassef Niddaḥim,” i.), the conversion took place in 620; according to others, in 740. King Joeph, in his letter to Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut (about 960), gives the following account of the conversion:

”Some centuries ago King Bulan reigned over the Chazars. To him God appeared in a dream and promised him might and glory. Encouraged by this dream, Bulan went by the road of Darlan to the country of Ardebil, where he gained great victories [over the Arabs].

“‘The Byzantine emperor and the calif of the Ishmaelites sent to him envoys with presents, and sages to convert him to their respective religions. Bulan invited also wise men of Israel, and proceeded to examine them all."

“As each of the champions believed his religion to be the best, Bulan separately questioned the Mohammedans and the Christians as to which of the other two religions they considered the better. When both gave preference to that of the Jews, that king perceived that it must be the true religion. He therefore adopted it."

“This account of the conversion was considered to be of a legendary nature. Harkavy, however (in ‘Bilbasov’ and ‘Yevreiskaya Biblioteka’), proved from Arabic and Slavonian sources that the religious disputation at the Chazarian court is a historical fact."

“Even the name of Sangari has been found in a liturgy of Constantine the Philosopher (Cyrill). It was one of the successors of Bulan, named Obadiah, who regenerated the kingdom and strengthened the Jewish religion.

“On the whole, King Joseph’s account agrees generally with the evidence given by the Arabic writers of the tenth century, but in detail it contains a few discrepancies.”

You can dismiss all this evidence as sheer nonsense, but let us be clear: a flood of historical scholarship has pointed to that conclusion in one way or another.

“The Khazars underscored their allegiance to the Jewish faith by adopting the Hebrew script and Hebrew personal names,” says historian Kevin Alan Brook, “even to the extent of naming some of their children after Jewish holidays such as Pesach and Hanukkha.”

More recently, historian Jim Wald wrote in the Times of Israel:

“It is well known that, sometime in the eighth to ninth centuries, the Khazars, a warlike Turkic people, converted to Judaism and ruled over a vast domain in what became southern Russia and Ukraine.

“What happened to them after the Russians destroyed that empire around the eleventh century has been a mystery. Many have speculated that the Khazars became the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews…

“Until now. In 2012, Israeli researcher Eran Elhaik published a study claiming to prove that Khazar ancestry is the single largest element in the Ashkenazi gene pool. Sand declared himself vindicated, and progressive organs such as Haaretz and The Forward trumpeted the results…

“Israel seems finally to have thrown in the towel. A blue-ribbon team of scholars from leading research institutions and museums has just issued a secret report to the government, acknowledging that European Jews are in fact Khazars. (Whether this would result in yet another proposal to revise the words to “Hatikvah” remains to be seen.).”

Having heard of the report, Netanyahu said off the record:

“We first thought that admitting we are really Khazars was one way to get around Abbas’s insistence that no Jew can remain in a Palestinian state. Maybe we were grasping at straws. But when he refused to accept that, it forced us to think about more creative solutions.

“The Ukrainian invitation for the Jews to return was a godsend. Relocating all the settlers within Israel in a short time would be difficult for reasons of logistics and economics. We certainly don’t want another fashlan like the expulsion of the settlers in the Gaza Hitnatkut[disengagement].”[

Some have dismissed all this research by saying that DNA evidence shows that the Khazarian theory is false. What those people will never have the courage to say is that a large section of the so-called DNA evidence has been shown to be false[***] and that other extrapolations which are built on the same hypothesis are simply functions of the Talmudic literature, which rabbis have propounded for years. This is why rabbis can say things like;

“The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle”—Rabbi Kook the Elder

[***] : Eran Elhaik, “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses,” Genome Biology and Human Evolution, December 2010: 61-70.

“the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of (members) of all nations of the world…A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity.”—Rabbi Menachem Mandel

“The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world…The Jewish body ‘looks as if it were in substance similar to bodies of non-Jews,’ but the meaning…is that the bodies only seem to be similar in material substance, outward look and superficial quality.

“The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews] ‘and their bodies are in vain…’”—Rabbi Schneerson

The laughable thing about this whole issue is that the people who believe that Jewish behavior is genetic argue that those Rabbis and Talmudic literature are liars and racists! Which is it?

I pointed out a few months ago to a proponent of the genetic theory that if Jewish behavior is primarily about DNA—which by the way is what the rabbinic literature propounds—then one must go all the way. That is, on what rational basis can we say that the same rabbinic literature is wrong when it postulates that the Goyim are just beasts? Are we not playing dice with the enemy when we are adopting their fraudulent and unnecessary theories?

I also pointed out that the rabbinic literature makes a diabolical case for killing the Palestinians, since they argue that “Jews” were in Palestine in the first place.

The same proponent quickly pointed out that the Old Testament claims that other people were there before the Hebrews came along. Now get this: this proponent did not even believe in the stories of the Old Testament but he was building his case using the Old Testament!