The Thirteenth Tribe

The Thirteenth Tribe
Author:
Series: Israel
Genre: Revisionist History
Tag: Zionism

Koestler 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 is a book that attempts to explain the origins of Eastern Europe's Jewish population,largely decimated by the Nazi onslaught during the Second World War. Koestler shows through extensive research, how a trading empire was set up by a tribe we know as the Khazars between the expanding power blocs of Christianity and Islam; how the people were converted to Judaism by their king as a way of standing apart from both, and how the people and their wealth were dispersed through the countries of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Khazar Empire.

It is a controversial history; because it challenges both the assumptions of Nazi philosophy and Zionism that the European Jews were racially different from the populations of the countries in which they later settled.

Koestler, as a Hungarian Jew himself, was particularly interested in the major part the Khazars played in the founding of the Hungarian nation; a fact which later led to the tragedy of 1944, when the Nazis exterminated over half-a -million Hungarian Jews, who were virtually indistinguishable from their Christian neighbours.

From Wikipedia:

Genetic research:

A 2005 study by Nebel et al., based on Y chromosome polymorphic markers, showed that Ashkenazi Jews are more closely related to other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than to the populations among whom they lived in Europe. However, 11.5% of male Ashkenazim were found to belong to Haplogroup R1a, the dominant Y chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europeans, suggesting possible gene flow. Referencing The Thirteenth Tribe, the study's authors note that "Some authors argue that after the fall of their kingdom in the second half of the 10th century CE, the Khazar converts were absorbed by the emerging Ashkenazi Jewish community in Eastern Europe." They conclude: "However, if the R-M17 chromosomes in Ashkenazi Jews do indeed represent the vestiges of the mysterious Khazars then, according to our data, this contribution was limited to either a single founder or a few closely related men, and does not exceed ~ 12% of the present-day Ashkenazim".

Writing in Science, Michael Balter states Koestler's thesis "clash[es] with several recent studies suggesting that Jewishness, including the Ashkenazi version, has deep genetic roots." He refers to a 2010 study by geneticist Harry Ostrer which found that Ashkenazi Jews "clustered more closely with Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jews, a finding the researchers say is inconsistent with the Khazar hypothesis" and concludes "that all three Jewish groups—Middle Eastern, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi—share genome wide genetic markers that distinguish them from other worldwide populations". Geneticist Noah Rosenberg asserts that although recent DNA studies "do not appear to support" the Khazar hypothesis, they do not "entirely eliminate it either."

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