Report: New Genetic Study Says Ashkenazi Jews Descend from Khazars

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yidden  Agence France-Presse reports: Jews of European origin are a mix of ancestries, with many hailing from tribes in the Caucasus who converted to Judaism and created an empire that lasted half a millennium, according to a gene study.

The investigation, its author says, should settle a debate that has been roiling for more than two centuries.

Jews of European descent, often called Ashkenazis, account for some 90 percent of the more than 13 million Jews in the world today.
According to the so-called Rhineland Hypothesis, Ashkenazis descended from Jews who progressively fled Palestine after the Moslem conquest of 638 AD.

They settled in southern Europe and then, in the late Middle Ages, about 50,000 of them moved from the Rhineland in Germany into eastern Europe, according to the hypothesis.

But detractors say this idea is implausible.

Barring a miracle -which some supporters of the Rhineland Hypothesis have in fact suggested – the scenario would have been demographically impossible.

It would mean that the population of Eastern European Jews leapt from 50,000 in the 15th century to around eight million at the start of the 20th century.

That birth rate would have been 10 times greater than that of the local non-Jewish population. And it would have occurred despite economic hardship, disease, wars and pogroms that ravaged Jewish communities.
Seeking new light in the argument, a study published in the British journal Genome Biology and Evolution, compares the genomes of 1,287 unrelated individuals who hail from eight Jewish and 74 non-Jewish populations.

Geneticist Eran Elhaik of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, trawled through this small mountain of data in search of single changes in the DNA code that are linked to a group’s geographical origins.

Such telltales have been used in past research to delve into the origins of the Basque people and the pygmy people of central Africa.

Among European Jews, Elhaik found ancestral signatures that pointed clearly to the Caucasus and also, but to a smaller degree, the Middle East.

The results, said Elhaik, give sound backing for the rival theory – the “Khazarian Hypothesis.”

Under this concept, eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars, a hotchpotch of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries AD and, influenced by Jews from Palestine, converted to Judaism in the 8th century.

The Judeo-Khazars built a flourishing empire, drawing in Jews from Mesopotamia and imperial Byzantium.

They became so successful that they sent offshoots into Hungary and Romania, planting the seeds of a great diaspora.

But Khazaria collapsed in the 13th century when it was attacked by the Mongols and became weakened by outbreaks of the Black Death.

The Judeo-Khazars fled westwards, settling in the rising Polish Kingdom and in Hungary, where their skills in finance, economics and politics were in demand, and eventually spread to central and western Europe, according to the “Khazarian Hypothesis.”

“We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaised Khazars, Greco-Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews and Judeans,” says Elhaik.

“Their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga, with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan.”

Many things are unknown about the Khazars, whose tribal confederation gathered Slavs, Scythians, Hunnic-Bulgars, Iranians, Alans and Turks.

But, argues Elhaik, the tale sketched in the genes is backed by archaeological findings, by Jewish literature that describes the Khazars’ conversion to Judaism, and by language, too.

“Yiddish, the language of Central and Eastern European Jews, began as a Slavic language” before being reclassified as High German, he notes.

Another pointer is that European Jews and their ancestral groups in the Caucasus and Middle East share a relatively high risk of diseases such as cystic fibrosis.

The investigation should help fine-tune a fast-expanding branch of genomics, which looks at single-change DNA mutations that are linked with inherited disease, adds Elhaik.

Source: Agence France-Presse

{Matzav.com Newscenter}


27 COMMENTS

  1. Here we go again – the same old canard and hoax to deligitimize the Jewish people. It has already been proven even DNA-wise that the whole Khazar myth is just that – a myth. All part of the newest form of anti-semitism and deligitimization of the Jewish people. Every day they get bolder and bolder and it is quite frightening. We need more teshuvah and prayerfully, it will lead us to the Geulah that much faster, which can’t come fast enough.

  2. Isn’t the opposite possible, that the reason these so called tribes share Jewish genes, is because of lost Jews who left Judaism and intermarried with them?

  3. THIS IS ARAB PROPAGANDA AND THE JEWS ARE FALLING FOR IT OUR GEDOLIM FROM THAT TIME HAVE NEVER SAID A WORD ABOUT THE KHAZARS IN FACT MANY BELIEVE THAT IT WAS AFICTITIOUS INVIVENTION OF R Y HALEVY IN HE KUZARI TO MAKE HIS HASHKOFO POINTS ANY SUBSEQUENT AND EXISTING INFO HAS BEEN PURE INVENTION AND SPECULATION THERE IS NOEVIDENCE THAT THIS KINGDOM HAS EVER EXISTED

  4. This hypothesis was debunked years ago as the work of anti-semites.
    90% of world Jews are Ashkenazim?
    Next thing Matzav will print is “The Protocolas of the Elders of Zion” as being real!

  5. Can’t believe Matzav actually published the above. Felt my IQ dropping 30 points reading trough this article:
    “Jews who progressively fled Palestine after the Moslem conquest of 638 AD” – so Romans did not disperse us trough Europe five hundred years before the era of Moslem Imperialism, after all?!
    “50,000 in the 15th century”-where did this figure come from?! Did the esteemed authors employ the same team of monkeys that provide the inflated Gaza population figures?!
    “found ancestral signatures that pointed clearly to the Caucasus” – so Turks(Khazars were Turks) are the same as Caucasus people?! From the various and very different Caucasus ethnic groups, which ones are classified as possessing the “Caucasus ancestral signatures”? Do the authors know anything about Caucasus?!
    “Khazaria collapsed in the 13th century when it was attacked by the Mongols” – complete idiocy – Khasars were exterminated by Kiev Russia in partnership with Byzantium in 965 – three centuries before Mongols rode into the pages of the world history.
    “Khazars, whose tribal confederation gathered Slavs, Scythians, Hunnic-Bulgars, Iranians, Alans and Turks” – where do I start: Scythians and Alans have mostly disappeared by the time Khazars came on the scene; Bulgars and Slavs were enemies – not memebers of Khazar “tribal confederation”; Turks and Iranians are extended group names, listing subgroups and general groups in one listing shows the author a complete ignoramus.
    “Yiddish, the language of Central and Eastern European Jews, began as a Slavic language” – yep, and by this logic the Boro Park Yiddish began as English, since it has borrowed so many English words.
    The above article is so idiotic, the Nobel Peace Prize comity has noticed, and will probably award the authors – together with Morsi and Asad.

  6. Here we go again. Arthur Koestler started this one out more than thirty years ago. It’s another facet of the “self-hating Jew” phenomenon, or the anti-Semitic canard that modern-day Jews aren’t the descendents of the Jews of the “Old Testament.” Several points: the “population explosion” is quite possible – population growth isn’t additive – it’s a power function. Check it out – there are twice as many people in the world now than there were in 1900. Point two: Yiddish is a Germanic language. Period. There are lots of Hebrew and Slavic borrowings, but the grammar is Old German.

    Every decade or so this fantasy comes back. There must be some sort of psychological quirk here, but that’s for the psychiatrists to figure out.

  7. You guys can rant as much as you want but the geneticist who did the study is the top in his field he is very good at what he does.

  8. To jomadar:
    He may have some publications on genetics but- let’s face reality – the facts that others listed above are undeniable. Yiddish IS indeed derived from German and share a large number of words (I speak both Yiddish and German).
    In short: there are so many stupid claims in this story that put a huge questionmark to the entire “scientific evidence”.
    And what about the “Kohen gene” that is also found in Ashkenazim?

  9. Addendum:
    If any of this was true and the Ashkenazim are not “real”, why is there absolutely no metion from any of the Sefardi Gedolim over the past 1000 years.

  10. “It would mean that the population of Eastern European Jews leapt from 50,000 in the 15th century to around eight million at the start of the 20th century.

    That birth rate would have been 10 times greater than that of the local non-Jewish population. And it would have occurred despite economic hardship, disease, wars and pogroms that ravaged Jewish communities.”

    Have they been to places like Boro Park, Williamsburg, Monroe and Meah Shearim lately? The Yidden there aren’t exactly having 1 or 2 kids. B”H we have had a baby boom going on for hundreds of years.

  11. When did converts become non-legitimate jews??? How by saying a people converted say they are not legitimate?? If a person was decendents of converts or not is not relevent.

  12. This is ludicrous, I consider myself of typical yichus,and I can trace myself to rashi from several points. From another angle I can easily trace to 1492 spain. In addition thousands of families lost yichus logs during WWII.

  13. Yankiv you are forgettng that those days a thousand or less years ago most of the children died of disease out of 10 maybee 3 survived,its notlike toay with technology to cure toddlers with an injection

  14. THIS IS ARAB PROPAGANDA

    Really? Are you sure? Are you absolutely convinced of that?

    If so, how do you equate your assertion with the fact that Dr. Eran Elhaik, who researched and wrote the article, is a native Israeli population geneticist and a postdoctorate fellow at Johns Hopkins University?

  15. #16, Anonymous: This has nothing to do with true converts(geirei tzedek). This is one of the forms of pure anti-semitism that has been around for decades and centuries against the Jewish people. The whole story of the khazars might very well be a myth to begin with. DNA has also already proven many times over that the Jewish people share the same DNA (both Ashkenazic & Sephardic). There is an upsurge by the enemies of the Jews to deny the authenticity of the Jewish people because there is a dejudaization process going on in both Israel and elsewhere to bring about the undoing of Torah and Yahadut. They couldn’t physically (the Jews are eternal), so they are doing their darndest spiritually – all part of their trying to eradicate G-D’s holy people.

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