Letter to Ron Avery, from ‘P.’ and his response posted below it:

An article on your site really goes to town on the Khazarian Jews. It’s fascinating why this theory has taken hold since it’s fairly recent but somehow cemented into people’s consciousness but it’s only with Koestler in 1976 and in 2013 and 2017 with professors below promoting it and when you look at their flimsy data it’s all quite nebulous. There’s no record of King Joseph of the Khazars ever converting or forcing a conversion, and according to Alexander Beider –

“the Khazarian hypothesis has been promoted by authors like the Tel Aviv University professor of history Shlomo Sand and Tel Aviv University professor of linguistics Paul Wexler, as well the geneticist Eran Elhaik.

Despite this institutional backing, the theory is absolutely without evidence. As any historian will tell you, generations of Jews, like generations of any people, leave historical traces behind them. These traces come in multiple forms. For starters, people leave behind them historical documents and archaeological data. Predictably, archaeologic evidence about the widespread existence of Jews in Khazaria is almost nonexistent.

Beider also describes onomastics as pure nonsense for Khazarian Jews – very few names in Eastern Europe have anything to do with Khazarian anything. That’s something my late Prussian professor, Walter Bruno Hermann Henning of Persian and Middle Eastern history through linguistics would have appreciated. Names of people and places reveal history and are slow to change unless you have a dopey Naming Commission such as Congress enacted and hopefully those names affected now will be reversed.

Beider also debunks the genetics theory as scientifically unproven –

“Finally, we come to genetics. One does not have to be a professional geneticist to see the inadequacy of the methodologies used by Eran Elhaik, the champion of the “Khazarian theory” in that domain. In his paper of 2013, he pretends to show that modern Ashkenazic Jews are genetically closer to Khazars than to biblical Hebrews. The last mention of Khazars is almost one thousand years old, while biblical times are also far from us. For these reasons, Elhaik needed modern substitutes, so he substituted Armenians and Georgians for Khazars (because all of them are related in some way to Caucasus); and he substituted Israeli Palestinians for biblical Hebrews. In his paper of 2016, he analyses the links between various population groups by introducing another “bold” idea, that of finding a sort of “geographic average” point for various genetic features. Using it, he links the Ashkenazic Jews to the southern part of the Black sea, not far from the Turkish border but still in places inhabited by fish only.

“Globally speaking, his general method is applicable only in a context of families that remained for centuries in the same places (for example, in Sardinia) but certainly not for population groups characterized by geographic mobility. As one of my friends pointed out, if we apply his idea to Barack Obama, the former US president will be classified as “Libyan” just because Libya lies in the middle of a line that unites Kenya and the UK.

“Globally speaking, all arguments suggested by proponents of Khazarian theory are either highly speculative or simply wrong. They cannot be taken seriously.

Ron’s Response:

Your letter did not contain the importance of the topic but the link did:

Stampfer said his research had no political motives, though he recognizes that the topic is politically fraught.

“It’s a really interesting historical question, but it has political implications,” he said. “As a historian, I’m naturally worried by the misuse of history. I think history should be removed from political discussions, but anyone who nevertheless wants to use history must at least present the correct facts. In this case, the facts are that the Khazars didn’t convert, the Jews aren’t descendants of the Khazars and the contemporary political problems between Israelis and Palestinians must be dealt with on the basis of current reality, not on the basis of a fictitious past.”

Sand had tied the Khazar issue directly to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling Haaretz in 2008 that many Jews fear that wide acceptance of his thesis would undermine their “historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea [ancient Israel] would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us … There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist.”

Stampfer believes the persistence of the Khazar conversion myth attests to researchers’ reluctance to abandon familiar paradigms.

We now see what the article intended to mean, namely; those calling themselves Jews in the “state of Israel” are the heirs of the God’s promises to Abraham. However, what makes a Jew has nothing to do with where they came from or who their mama or daddy was.

As a Christian being translated into the Kingdom of Heaven or God on earth 49 years ago by participation in the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ Jesus, I have always disregarded any discussion of the “good-Jew bad-Jew” or “authentic-Jew imposter-Jew.”

The Entire New Testament is filled with irrefutable evidence of who the real Jews are and who are the heirs of Abraham and the promised land. It is most economically stated in one scripture which is explained throughout the New Testament (Galatians 3:16):

“Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.”

Christ Jesus is the only seed of Abraham and the only heir of Abraham and only those who have been translated by the operation of Christ Jesus are heirs of the promised of God to Abraham. None of those who claim to be Jews but reject Christ Jesus as the Messiah and savior of the world are Jews and heirs of Abraham.

Therefore, the entire antichrist unlawful “state of Israel” has no right to exist or defend itself as none of these Synagogans are Jews and heirs of the promised land which is the entire cosmos not merely a segment of desert real estate in the Middle East. My new book explains all this in detail with New Testament scripture:

https://mixnstream.com/mns-truth-threatens.html

I hope you find this response useful and enlightening. We have held the answer to the question of the right of Israel to exist and defend itself for 2000 years. It is the falling away of the church that has given rise to all these absurd questions which I also explain in my new book.

Thank you for sending me this opportunity to explain why none of the arguments about the origin or blood line of people can prove who the Jews and heirs of Abraham are.

Sincerely,

Ron Avery

RELATED ARTICLE:

Not Our People: Khazar warriors depicted in Itil, a Silk Road city that served as the Khazar capital. Image by wikimapia

(Haaretz) — The claim that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars who converted in the Middle Ages is a myth, according to new research by a Hebrew University historian.

The Khazar thesis gained global prominence when Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University published “The Invention of the Jewish People” in 2008. In that book, which became a best seller and was translated into several languages, Sand argued that the “Jewish people” is an invention, forged out of myths and fictitious “history” to justify Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel.

Now, another Israeli historian has challenged one of the foundations of Sand’s argument: his claim that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the people of the Khazar kingdom, who in the eighth century converted en masse on the instruction of their king. In an article published this month in the journal “Jewish Social Studies,” Prof. Shaul Stampfer concluded that there is no evidence to support this assertion.

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“Such a conversion, even though it’s a wonderful story, never happened,” Stampfer said.

Stampfer, an expert in Jewish history, analyzed material from various fields, but found no reliable source for the claim that the Khazars – a multiethnic kingdom that included Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians – converted to Judaism. “There never was a conversion by the Khazar king or the Khazar elite,” he said. “The conversion of the Khazars is a myth with no factual basis.”

As a historian, he said he was surprised to discover how hard it is “to prove that something didn’t happen. Until now, most of my research has been aimed at discovering or clarifying what did happen in the past … It’s a much more difficult challenge to prove that something didn’t happen than to prove it did.”

That’s because the proof is based primarily on the absence of evidence rather than its presence – like the fact that an event as unprecedented as an entire kingdom’s conversion to Judaism merited no mention in contemporaneous sources.

“The silence of so many sources about the Khazars’ Judaism is very suspicious,” Stampfer said. “The Byzantines, the geonim [Jewish religious leaders of the sixth to eleventh centuries], the sages of Egypt – none of them have a word about the Jewish Khazars.”

The research ended up taking him four years. “I thought I’d finish in two months, but I discovered that there was a huge amount of work. I had to check sources that aren’t in my field, and I consulted and got help from many people.”

Stampfer said his research had no political motives, though he recognizes that the topic is politically fraught.

“It’s a really interesting historical question, but it has political implications,” he said. “As a historian, I’m naturally worried by the misuse of history. I think history should be removed from political discussions, but anyone who nevertheless wants to use history must at least present the correct facts. In this case, the facts are that the Khazars didn’t convert, the Jews aren’t descendants of the Khazars and the contemporary political problems between Israelis and Palestinians must be dealt with on the basis of current reality, not on the basis of a fictitious past.”

Sand had tied the Khazar issue directly to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling Haaretz in 2008 that many Jews fear that wide acceptance of his thesis would undermine their “historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea [ancient Israel] would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us … There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist.”

Stampfer believes the persistence of the Khazar conversion myth attests to researchers’ reluctance to abandon familiar paradigms.

“Those who believed this story – and they are many – usually didn’t do so for malicious reasons,” he says. “I tell my students that the only thing I want them to remember from my classes is the need to investigate and ask – to investigate whether the arguments they hear are credible, reasonable and well-founded.”

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