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Khazar myth

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Khazar myth, also known as the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi origin, is a disproven antisemitic conspiracy theory[1] alleging that "European Jews descended from the Khazars".[1] Decades of peer-reviewed genetic studies have found no scientific evidence for the Khazar myth.[2][3]

Background

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Khazars

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See the main article: Khazars

The Khazars were made up of a confederation of Turkic peoples who set up multiple kingdoms – known as khanates – across Central Asia and southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages.[1] They were said to have fled to Eastern Europe following the downfall of the Khazar empire.[1]

Myth's origin

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Further information: Supersessionism, Black Hebrew Israelites, and Roman Catholics and antisemitism in the 21st century

French scholar Ernest Renan reportedly came up with the myth in 1808 AD, which has ever since been promoted by fascists,[4] KKK,[5] Neo-Nazis,[1] Arab nationalists,[6] the Nation of Islam (NOI)[7] and the Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) movement.[8]

Black Hebrew Israelites, who refuse to believe that Jesus was Jewish, protested in San Diego, California against the long-standing depiction of Jesus as a "White man" rather than a Black man.
A propaganda poster made by the Black Hebrew Israelites implying that Black and Native Americans are the "real" descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The Black Hebrew Israelites allege that the said peoples have been "wrongfully" classified by White imperialists into different ethnic groups across the Western hemisphere.

Particularly, at a 1947 UN conference on the Partition Plan for Palestine, Arab nationalist speakers Faris al-Khoury and Jamal Al-Husseini cited the Khazar myth to deny the historical connection of Jews to the land and oppose the founding of the modern State of Israel,[6] which has also become a main theme in contemporary antisemitic propaganda worldwide,[7][8] with a substantial degree of influence in Western academia.[7][8]

Research

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As mentioned above, the Khazar myth is an unscientific[2][3] conspiracy theory.[1][5] Eran Elhaik, an Israeli-American scholar who published controversial papers claiming to have found evidence for the Khazar myth, was criticized by several other biologists who conducted genetic studies to disprove his claims.[2][3] In response, Elhaik accused the biologists of being "liars" and "frauds",[2][3] denying that he had ever misused his genomic data to "defame the Jewish people",[2][3] despite Elhaik's papers lending support to antisemites systematically promoting the Khazar myth.[8]

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References

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5
    • Harkabi, Yehoshafat (1987) [1968]. "Contemporary Arab Anti-Semitism: its Causes and Roots". In Fein, Helen (ed.). The Persisting Question: Sociological Perspectives and Social Contexts of Modern Antisemitism. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 412–427. ISBN 978-3-11-010170-6.
    • Schnirelmann, Victor A. (2007a). "The story of a euphemism: The Khazars in Russian Nationalist Literature 353-372". In Golden, Peter B.; Ben-Shammai, Haggai; Róna-Tas, András (eds.). The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Vol. 17. Brill. pp. 353–372. ISBN 978-90-04-16042-2.
    • Singerman, Robert (2004). "Contemporary Racist and Judeophobic Ideology Discovers the Khazars, or, Who Really Are the Jews?". Rosaline and Myer Feinstein Lecture Series 2004. Retrieved 1 March 2014.
    • Rossman, Vadim Joseph (2007). "Anti-Semitism in Eurasian Historiography: The Case of Lev Gumilev". In Shlapentokh, Dmitry (ed.). Russia Between East and West: Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism. Brill. ISBN 978-9-004-15415-5.
    • Rory Miller(2020) The anti-Zionist ‘Jewish Khazar’ syndrome in the official British mind
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4
  4. ↑ Pound & Zukofsky 1987, p. xxi, citing letters of 10 July 1938 and 24/25 September 1955. Ahearn speculates that [Ezra] Pound may have thought:'If there were no such people as Jews, then the problem of indiscriminate anti-Semitism would disappear. On could focus one’s attention on usurers of whatever description.'
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Gardell 2002, p. 165.'The formative period of Christian Identity[broken anchor] could roughly be said to be the three decades between 1940 and 1970. Through missionaries like Wesley Swift, Bertrand Comparet and William Potter Gale, it took on a white racialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and far-right conservative political outlook. Combined with the teachings of early disciples Richard G. Butler, Colonel Jack Mohr and James K. Warner, a distinctly racist theology was gradually formed. Whites were said to be the Adamic people, created in His likeness. A notion of a pre-earthly existence is found in an important substratum, teaching that whites either had a spiritual or extraterrestrial pre-existence. Blacks were either pre-Adamic soulless creatures or represented fallen, evil spirits, but they were not the chief target of fear and hatred. This position was reserved for Jews. The latent anti-Semitism found in British-Israelism rose to prominence. Jews were, at best, reduced to mongrelized imposters, not infrequently identified with Eurasian Khazars without any legitimate claim to a closeness with God, and at worst denounced as the offspring of Satan.'
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Harkabi 1987, p. 424: "Arab anti-Semitism might have been expected to be free from the idea of racial odium, since Jews and Arabs are both regarded by race theory as Semites, but the odium is directed, not against the Semitic race, but against the Jews as a historical group. The main idea is that the Jews, racially, are a mongrel community, most of them being not Semites, but of Khazar and European origin." This essay was translated from Harkabi Hebrew text 'Arab Antisemitism' in Shmuel Ettinger, Continuity and Discontinuity in Antisemitism (Hebrew), 1968, p.50.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3
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