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Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry


The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, often called the "Khazar myth" by its critics, is the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars, a multi-ethnic conglomerate of Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic Khanate in the area extending from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. The hypothesis draws on some medieval sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which at some point in the 8th–9th centuries, the ruling elite of the Khazars was said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism. The scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain: the evidence used to tie the Ashkenazi communities to the Khazars is exiguous and subject to conflicting interpretations.

This hypothesis has had a complex history within academia. While most contemporary scholars dismiss it, the hypothesis has often been argued in the past, and still finds occasional defenders of its plausibility. In the late 19th century, Ernest Renan and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe originated among Turkic refugees who had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into Europe, and exchanged their native Khazar language for Yiddish while continuing to practice Judaism. Though intermittently evoked by several scholars since that time, the Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976. It has been revived recently by Eran Elhaik, who in 2012 conducted a study aiming to vindicate it. Despite skepticism, he reformulated the concept in 2016 by developing a novel method of genetic analysis that uses the fringe linguistic theories of the Yiddish expert Paul Wexler.


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