Koestler: The thirteenth tribe
Arthur Koestler passed away 26 years ago today. He is most famous for his “Darkness at noon“, a novel giving an inside view of Stalin’s purges of the 1930′s USSR. Koestler was Jewish, lived in a kibbutz in the 1920′s, but had an antagonistic relationship to his Judaism. In a Jewish context Koestler is mostly known more for “The thirteenth tribe; the Khazar empire and its heritage.” In it he advocated the idea that contemporary European Jewry are descendents of the Khazars. According to his theory the Khazars, people form the Caucasian region converted to Judaism en masse in the 8th century. More recent scholarship disputed his theory. Nevertheless we have the book and it is a very interesting read even if proven unfounded later.
Leanne:
I was just reading about Shlomo Sand and his French book prize. His book claims that not only were European Jews decended from converts, so were Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews. The decendants of Bliblical Jews all converted to Islam or Christianity and are now Arabs. The book itself won’t be translated into English for a while.
Aside from whether the genetic thesis is true, it assumes that Judaism is based on blood lines, which it never has been. Even though all 4 of my grandparents spoke Yiddish, there was one with straight blond hair and blue eyes, and other relatives with Mongol-horde-type features– even in old family mythology we never thought of ourselves as purebred descendants of Judea, and it never bothered us at all.
16 March 2009, 6:41 pmKevin Brook:
“The Jews of Khazaria, Second Edition” (2006) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0742549828/ref=nosim/congbethamili-20 is a more up-to-date and accurate account of the Khazar Empire. It disproves the contentions of Koestler and Sand that the majority of Ashkenazic ancestry comes from the Khazars, but does show that traces of the Khazars exist. An essential purchase for all Jewish libraries, since the books by Koestler and Dunlop are outdated and inadequate.
13 October 2009, 7:56 pm