NOTE: Posted with kind permission from Barry Chamish.
KOESTLER, KHAZAR, KAPUT
by Barry Chamish
Now, you'd think I had something more important to write about with Syria training Hizbullah in the Bekaa Valley on precision guided, long range missiles, with the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak reacting by stopping the distribution of gas masks to his people and evacuating all training troops on the Golan Heights lest Syria think Israel is preparing to defend itself. A bad war is coming and I'm wasting your time and mine by writing about a medieval kingdom called Khazaria.
A generation ago, correspondence between a Spanish rabbi and the King of Khazaria a thousand years ago led to a series of books about a Jewish state that stopped the Muslim armies from capturing Europe. In a burst of Jewish pride, the authors told of a central Asian royal court that converted to Judaism, defeated the Islamic armies and saved Europe, just to its west.
But one book, The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler, took the thesis a step further and speculated that the fall of Khazaria in the 11th century led to a mass migration that created Ashkenazi, or European, Jewry. To Koestler's delight, his speculation became a hit book in America.
Just so we know, Koestler was a rather inconsistent thinker. He was at times a communist, an anti-communist, and ended his career as a New Age author. But one philosophy stuck with him; in the '30s he moved to Israel and remained a Zionist all his life. He would twist in his grave if he saw how American anti-semites had twisted his ruminations. They view Koestler as a prophet of Jew-hatred and his book as belonging in the second tier of theocracy just behind the Bible.
According to them, since the Jews are not God's chosen people, instead are proto-Turks masquerading as Jews, we have no historical claim to Israel because we have no right to call ourselves Jews. Thus, only Sephardim are the real thing. What is planned for them in the future is never stated, but the Ashkenazim are fit for extermination, though only the most vicious of the lot openly say so. But the lines aren't hard to read between.
These anti-semites look for any excuse to attack Israel and her allies and sometimes the rationales are plainly absurd. They have no love for Arabs either but use Israel's war on Gaza as the latest in a long line of useful whipping boys. Any excuse that's handy will do. Never mind that the Arabs don't buy into the Khazarian nonsense; they back them because they're fighting Jews even if they are ignorant of Koestler's holy truth.
In the past, I have rarely mentioned the American far Right and its new Khazarian ideology. Here is a rare example from my book Save Israel:
This caller insisted that 95% of Jews are actually not descended from Abraham but rather of a Medieval Turkish tribe called the Khazars.
"Do you think," I asked, "that if 95% of Jews were from Khazaria we would have forgotten that? Jews have long, exact memories and we know where we were. If it was in Khazaria we wouldn't have forgotten it. And if we were Khazars, Yiddish would be a Turkish-based language, which it is not. I don't think there are any Khazarian words in Yiddish. The Khazarian royal court did covert to Judaism, mostly for political reasons, but the Khazar people didn't or we would have remembered it."
Back then, I didn't think debunking Jew hatred was worth my energy. Today, I have an argument that should put the argument to rest forever, though I know a good hater never gives up. I know people who still think Russia is going to war against Israel next week. And there are those who think mankind has nothing to do with glaciers and ice sheets melting. In fact there are people who think ALL science is bunk, but especially genealogy.
They may as well stop reading.
To the rest of us: As for Khazarian nonsense, Google Jewish DNA. You will find that Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews share the same DNA markers, Cohenim have the same DNA traits in all nations, and not a drop of Khazarian blood is found anywhere.
Researchers - Anna C Need, Dalia Kasperavi i t , Elizabeth T Cirulli and David B Goldstein
These possibilities can be distinguished to a degree by comparing the position of the full Ashkenazi Jewish cluster to a series of geographically distributed populations represented by the human genome diversity panel [9]. We found that the full Jewish cluster fell between that of Middle Eastern and European populations. We also compared the average heterozygosity across the set of linkage disequilibrium-pruned polymorphisms in those with full Jewish ancestry to those without, and found that the subjects with four Jewish grandparents were, on average, slightly more heterozygous than the subjects with no Jewish ancestry. These data therefore suggest that the Jewish group is distinguished from non-Jewish Europeans more because of their genetic heritage in the Near East than due to population bottlenecks perturbing the genetic composition of Jewish groups.
Conclusion
We show that, at least in the context of the studied sample, it is possible to predict full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry with 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity, although it should be noted that the exact dividing line between a Jewish and non-Jewish cluster will vary across sample sets, which, in practice, would reduce the accuracy of the prediction. While the full historical demographic explanations for this distinction remain to be resolved, it is clear that the genomes of individuals with full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry carry an unambiguous signature of their Jewish heritage, and this seems more likely to be due to their specific Middle Eastern ancestry than to inbreeding.
Try this:
Dr. Karl Skorecki works on the cutting edge of molecular science, revolutionizing medicine through genetics and the use of stem cells to test anti-cancer therapies. As a sideline, he has become world famous for applying genetics to genealogy and transforming history. He has found evidence to support traditional claims that modern-day Jewish priests, Cohanim, are descended from a single common male ancestor - biblically said to be Aaron, the older brother of Moses. Skorecki's test found an array of six common chromosomal markers in 97 of the 106 Cohens he tested. Calculations based on variations of the mutations rooted the men's shared ancestry 3,300 years ago, or the approximate time of Exodus. He also discovered the common set of genetic markers in both Ashkenazi (European) and Sephardic (North African) Cohens, indicating they shared the same ancestry before their communities were separated more than 1,000 years ago.
"It's like an archeological finding. But instead of digging up in the sand, we dig in contemporary DNA," Skorecki says.(National Post-Canada)
ASHKENAZI LINKS
Although the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish community separated from their Mediterranean ancestors some 1,200 years ago and lived among Central and Eastern European gentiles, their paternal gene pool still resembles that of other Jewish and Semitic groups originating in the Middle East.A low rate of intermarriage between Diaspora Jews and local gentiles was the key reason for this continuity. Since the Jews first settled in Europe more than 50 generations ago, the intermarriage rate was estimated to be only about 0.5% in each generation.
The findings oppose the suggestion that Ashkenazim are descended from the Kuzars.
The Ashkenazi paternal gene pool does not appear to be similar to that of present-day Turkish speakers. This finding opposes the suggestion that Ashkenazim are descended from the Kuzars, a Turkish-Asian empire that converted to Judaism en masse in or about the 8th century CE.
You would think by now that Koestler and Khazaria are kaput. However...never underestimate raw hate!
Barbara Hartwell Percival
Legal Defense & Research Trust
Legal Defense & Research Trust