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Who are the
Khazars?

See also "The
Thirteenth Tribe" by Arthur Koestler.

The 1000 Year War Between Russia And The Khazars
Dr.
Beter, 1979

Topic #3--Over the past two years or so I have
discussed the struggle
within Russia between the Christians and the
Bolsheviks since 1917.
Current events cannot be understood without
knowing about the past
six decades of struggle for control of the
Kremlin. But that struggle
in turn is part of an even bigger
historical picture. What we are seeing
today, my friends, is the
climax of a war of more than a thousand years
between the two most
bitter enemies on earth. It is the war between
RUSSIA and the
KHAZARS.

The empire of the Khazars vanished from the map of the
world many
centuries ago. Today many people have never even heard of
it, yet in
its day the Khazar empire was a very major power indeed,
holding sway
over a large empire of subjugated peoples. It had to be
reckoned with
by the two neighboring superpowers of that day. To the
south and west
of Khazaria the Byzantine Empire was in full flower
with its Eastern
Orthodox Christian civilization. To the southeast,
the Khazar empire
bordered on the expanding Moslem Empire of the Arab
Caliphs. The
Khazars influenced the histories of both of these other
empires but,
far more importantly, the Khazar empire occupied what was
later to
become a southern portion of Russia between the Black and
Caspian
Seas. As a result, the historical destinies of the Russians
and the Khazars
became intertwined in ways which have persisted down
to the present day.

In case you have never heard of the Khazars, I
think I should mention
where you can look to learn more about them.
Three years ago in 1976
a book about the Khazars was published by the
British writer Arthur
Koestler. The book is titled "THE 13TH TRIBE -
THE KHAZAR
EMPIRE AND ITS HERITAGE." The American publisher is Random

House, New York, N.Y. History records that the Khazars were derived

from a mixture of Mongols, Turks, and Finns. As early as the 3rd

Century A.D., they were identifiable in constant warfare in the areas

of Persia and Armenia.

Later, in the 5th Century, the Khazars
were among the devastating
hordes of Attila the Hun. Around 550 A.D.,
the nomadic Khazars
began settling themselves in the area around the
northern Caucasus
between the Black and Caspian Seas. The Khazar
capital of Itil was
established at the mouth of the Volga River where
it emptied into
the Caspian, in order to control the river traffic.
The Khazars then
exacted a toll of 10% on any and all cargo which
passed Itil on the
river. Those who refused were attacked and
slaughtered.

With their empire firmly established in the Caucasus,
the Khazars
gradually began to create an empire of subjugated peoples.
More
and more Slavonic tribes, who were peaceful compared to the
Khazars,
were attacked and conquered. They became parts of the Khazar
Empire,
required to pay tribute continually to the Khazar empire.
Tribute by
conquered peoples has always been a feature of empires, of
course,
but not in the fashion of the Khazars. The so-called great
empires of
the world always gave something in return for the tribute
they exacted.
Rome, for example, made citizens of those they
conquered; and in
return for the taxes they levied, they brought
civilization, order, and
protection against attack from would-be
invaders. But not so in the
Khazar Empire. The peoples who were
subject to the Khazars received
only one thing in return for their
payments of tribute, and that was a
shaky promise: the Khazars would
refrain from further attacks and
pillage so long as the tributes were
paid. The subjects of the Khazar
Empire, therefore, were nothing more
than the victims of a giant
protection racket.

The Khazar
overlords were therefore resented universally and bitterly
throughout
their domain, but they were also feared because of the
merciless way
in which they dealt with anyone who stood up to them.
And so the
Khazar Empire expanded until it occupied large areas of
what is now
Russia and southeastern Europe. By the 8th Century, the
Khazar Empire
extended northward to Kiev and westward to include
the Magyars, the
ancestors of modern Hungary.

In about 740 A.D., a stunning event
took place. The Khazars had been
under continual pressure from their
Byzantine and Moslem neighbors
to adopt either Christianity or Islam;
but the Khazar ruler, called the
Kagan, had heard of a third religion
called JUDAISM. Apparently for
political reasons of independence, the
Kagan announced that the
Khazars were adopting Judaism as their
religion. Overnight an entirely
new group of people, the warlike
Khazars, suddenly proclaimed them-
selves Jews--adoptive Jews. The
Khazar empire began to be described
as the "empire of the Jews" by
historians of that day. Succeeding Khazar
rulers took Jewish names,
and during the late 9th Century the Khazar
empire became a haven for
Jews from other lands.

Meanwhile the brutal Khazar domination over
other peoples continued
unchanged. But then a new factor appeared on
the scene. During the 8th
Century they came coursing down the great
rivers--the Dnieper, the Don,
the Volga. They were the eastern branch
of the Vikings. They were known
as the Varangians, or as the Rus. Like
other Vikings, the Rus were bold
adventurers and fierce fighters; but
when they tangled with the Khazars,
the Rus often ended up paying
tribute like everyone else.

In the year 862 a Rus leader named
Rurik founded the city of Novgorod,
and the RUSSIAN NATION was born.
The Rus Vikings settled among
the Slavonic tribes under Khazar
domination, and the struggle between
Vikings and Khazars changed in
character. It became a struggle by the
emerging nation of Russia for
independence from Khazar oppression.

Over a century after the
founding of Russia's first city, another
momentous event took place.
Russia's leader, Prince Vladimir of Kiev,
accepted baptism as a
Christian in the year 989. He actively promoted
Christianity in Russia,
and his memory is revered by Russians today as
"Saint Vladimir"; and so
a thousand years ago Russia's tradition as a
Christian nation
began.

Vladimir's conversion also brought Russia into alliance with
Byzantium.
The Byzantine rulers had always feared the Khazars, and the
Russians
were still struggling to free themselves. And so in the year
1016, combined
Russian and Byzantine forces attacked the Khazar empire.
The Khazar
Empire was shattered, and the empire of the Khazars itself
fell into
decline. Eventually most of the Khazar Jews migrated to other
areas.
Many of them wound up in eastern Europe, where they mingled and

intermarried with other Jews. Like the Semitic Jews some 1000 years

earlier, the Khazar Jews became dispersed. The empire of the Khazars

was no more.

As they moved and lived among the Jewish people,
the Khazar Jews
passed on a distinct heritage from generation to
generation. One element
of the Khazar Jew heritage is a militant form
of ZIONISM. In the view
of Khazar Jews, the land occupied by ancient
Israel is to be retaken--not
by miracle but by armed force. This is
what is meant by Zionism today,
and this is the force that created the
nation which calls itself Israel
today.

The other major
ingredient of the Khazar Jew heritage is hatred for
Christianity, and
for the Russian people as the champions of the
Christian faith.
Christianity is viewed as the force which caused the
ancient so-called
empire of the Jews, the Khazar empire, to collapse.
Having once
dominated much of what is present-day Russia, the
Khazar Jews still
want to reestablish that domination--and for a
millennium they have
been trying continually to do just that.

In 1917 the Khazar Jews
passed a major milestone toward the creation
of their own state in
Palestine as I mentioned last month. That same
year they also created
the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. There
followed a Christian
holocaust, the likes of which the world has never
seen. The Khazar
Jews were once again in control of Russia after more
than 900 years,
and they set about the task of destroying Christianity by
destroying
Christians--over 100-million of them, and at the same time
over
20-million religious Jews also died at the hands of the Khazar
Jews.
This, my friends, is what the Russian Christians were up against
in their
60-year struggle to overthrow the atheistic Bolsheviks; but
they finally
succeeded in their overthrow program, and now the
1000-year-old war
between the Russian Christians and the Khazar Jews is
reaching a climax.
At stake is not only the future of Russia and of
Christianity, but also
of the Jewish people as a whole.

Last
month on August 19, 1979, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum died in New
York. He
died in the morning, and was buried the same afternoon.
Very short
notice, and yet some 100,000 Jewish men arrived in time
for the
funeral. It is hard to imagine how many more hundreds of
thousands
could not arrive on such short notice. A month later, on
September 18,
his followers placed a memorial tribute by way of a
paid advertisement
in the New York Times, and clearly it spoke for
many Jews. Among other
things it said, quote: "He was the undisputed
leader of all Jews
everywhere who had not been infected by Zionism";
and also, quote:
"With a courage all too rare in our time, he called the
Zionist state
'a work of Satan, a sacrilege, and a blasphemy.' The shedding
of blood
for the sake of the Zionist state was abhorrent to him."

These
words, my friends, were spoken by Orthodox Jews mourning for
their
fallen leader. And the new Christian rulers of Russia would agree
for
they, too, regard the Zionist state of Israel as a counterfeit, a
cruel
and dangerous hoax for Christian and Jew alike. The Khazar state
called
the "Empire of the Jews" a thousand years ago was a parasite,
living on
the tribute from conquered peoples. Likewise today, Israel
depends for
its survival on a never-ending flow of support from
outside. Left
unchecked, the Russians believe that the Khazar Jews will
destroy
Christianity by means of Zionism, and Russia through
Bolshevism;
so Russia's Christian rulers are on the offensive against
their enemies
of a thousand years, the Khazars.

We Americans
who call ourselves Christians have not cared enough to
open our eyes
to try to save our own country, or to defend our faith.
So now our
land has become the battleground of the Christian Russians
and their
deadly enemies--the Bolsheviks and the Zionists. And like it or
not,
my friends, we are caught up in this all-out war.

Dr. Beter
1979

Are Russian Jews Descended from the Khazars?

"A Reassessment Based upon the Latest Historical, Archaeological,
Linguistic, and Genetic Evidence," by Kevin Alan Brook

The "traditional" view is that Eastern European Jews descend almost
entirely from French and German Jews. This essay presents the pros and
cons of the controversial "Khazar theory" of Eastern European Jewish
origins and will attempt to provide a likely middle-ground solution to the
question. Unlike other treatments of the question, this essay uses recent
discoveries, is meant to be objective, and is fully sourced so that you
can be guaranteed of the authenticity of the information. In summary, I
argue in this essay that Eastern European Jews descend both from Khazarian
Jews AND from Israelite Jews.

PART 1: Evidence in favor of the Khazar theory

Judaism is now known to have been more widespread among the Khazar
inhabitants of the Khazar kingdom than was previously thought. The
findings described below add strength to the argument that there were many
Jews residing in eastern Europe prior to the immigration of German,
Austrian, Bohemian, Spanish, and Portugese Jews into Poland and Hungary.

Hebrew characters were allegedly found engraved on utensils from a
Khazarian site in the Don river valley of Russia:

"The Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg, Russia finishes
reconstructing fragments of utensils found in Khazarian sites, where the
word 'Israel' in Hebrew characters is mentioned several times." - Alicia
Dujovne Ortiz, "El fantasma de los jázaros." La Nación (Buenos Aires,
Argentina, August 14, 1999).

"No one, on the other hand, could distinguish a specific culture, a
fortiori a Jewish culture, until the very recent reconstitution by the
Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg (Russia), of fragments of utensils,
put at the day in 1901, revealed four times the word 'Israel' in Hebraic
letters." - Nicolas Weill, "L'histoire retrouvée des Khazars." Le Monde
des Livres (July 9, 1999): 12.

"Russian archeologists reexamining finds excavated from Khazar sites in
the area of the Don River in southern Russia recently discovered an
ancient vessel inscribed with the word "Israel" in Hebrew lettering. The
broken fragments of the vessel, originally unearthed in the 60s, were only
recently put together. The result is the firmest verification yet of
historical sources that point to the mass conversion to Judaism of the
Khazar empire in 740 C.E." - Ehud Ya'ari, "Archaeological Finds Add Weight
to Claim that Khazars Converted to Judaism." The Jerusalem Report (June
21, 1999), page 8.

A so-called "Jewish Khazar" ring was buried in a grave in medieval
Hungary:

"A silver ring found in a cemetery in Ellend, near Pécs in southwestern
Hungary and not far from the villages of Nagykozár and Kiskozár, is
believed to be of Khazar-Kabar origin. The ring, which dates from the
second half of the eleventh century, was found next to a woman's skeleton,
and has thirteen Hebrew letters engraved on it as ornamentation." - Kevin
Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (Jason Aronson, 1999), pages 208-209,
following the argument of Alexander Scheiber and Attila Kiss which was
also adopted by Raphael Patai and Eli Valley. However, it does not spell
out real Hebrew words, and is mixed with many non-Hebrew letters and
symbols. Scheiber, Kiss, and others argued that the woman was from one of
the two nearby Khazar villages.

Jewish symbols were placed on bricks at another burial site in medieval
Hungary, which is now located in northern Serbia:

"In 1972, 263 graves were discovered near the village of Chelarevo, in
the Vojvodina district of present-day Serbia...More important, Jewish
motifs have been found on at least seventy of the brick fragments
excavated from the graves. The Jewish symbols on the fragments include
menorahs, shofars, etrogs, candle-snuffers, and ash-collectors. One of the
brick fragments, which was placed over the grave of Yehudah, has a Hebrew
inscription that reads, 'Yehudah, oh!' The skulls in the Chelarevo graves
had Mongolian features..." - Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (Jason
Aronson, 1999), page 251.

"One can conjecture that this burial ground belonged to the Kabar
tribes which joined the Hungarians at the time when they discovered their
fatherland. Some of the Kabars, arriving from Khazaria, apparently kept
their Judaic religion." - István Erdélyi, "Kabari (Kavari) v Karpatskom
Basseyne." Sovietskaya Arkheologiya 4 (1983): 179.

"The early-medieval graveyard and settlement at CHelarevo, near Novi
Sad, offers the most numerous and most unusual finds with Jewish symbols.
Along with several hundreds of graves of typically Avaric characteristics
(judging by the pottery, jewellery and horsemen's gear), excavations begun
in 1972 produced several hundreds of graves of the same shape but lacking
any additional burial objects...each grave was marked by a fragment of a
Roman brick (never a whole brick, although these were plentiful in the
near-by older Roman sites) into which a menorah was cut, and most
frequently two other Jewish symbols on its left and right sides: the
shofar and an etrog, a lulav on some bricks, and even a small Jewish
six-pointed star. Some 450 brick fragments have so far been found. The
position and size of the incised motifs were adapted to the size and shape
of each of the fragments, which means that the motifs were not there on
the original whole bricks. Some of the fragments had a Hebrew inscription
added - a name or a few words which, with the exception of JERUSALEM and
ISRAEL, are difficult to decipher because of the damage. Some of the
Hebrew characters are carved with great precision...Several hypotheses
have been proposed on the possible origin of a Jewish or Judaised
population who marked the graves of their dead in this unusual way and had
literate people among them. The influence of the Crimea Khazars has been
mentioned in this context; their ruler, nobility and part of the
population were Judaised in the 8 c., and many Jews who had emigrated from
Asia Minor and Byzantium, lived among them." - Ante Soric et al (editors),
Jews in Yugoslavia: Muzejski prostor, Zagreb, Jezuitski trg 4. (Zagreb:
MGC, 1989), page 28.

"In excavations at a large graveyard apparently dating to the end of
the eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries, when the region was under
the domination of the Avar tribe, archeologists have unearthed hundreds of
brick fragments inscribed with menorahs and other Jewish symbols,
including at least one small six-pointed Star of David. Some brick
fragments also were inscribed with Hebrew letters. Research has shown that
the people buried at Celarevo were of the Mongol race, apparently a tribe
that had newly migrated into the area from the east. Beyond that, the
origin of this Jewish settlement remains a mystery: One hypothesis has
suggested that they may have been influenced by the Crimean Khazars, a
tribe whose leaders converted to Judaism in the eighth century." - Ruth
Ellen Gruber, Jewish Heritage Travel, 3rd edition (Jason Aronson, 1999),
page 248.

In addition to the Hungarian site above, the Star of David was found at
two sites in the Khazar kingdom, even though it is unclear whether the
symbol was used there for Jewish purposes:

"Engravings of the six-pointed Jewish star of David were found on
circular Khazar relics and bronze mirrors from Sarkel and Khazarian
gravefields in Verkhneye Saltovo." - Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of
Khazaria (Jason Aronson, 1999), page 142.

In the early 10th century, the Khazarian Jews of Kiev wrote a letter of
recommendation on behalf of one of the members of their community, whose
name was Yaakov bar Hanukkah. The letter is known as the Kievan Letter and
was discovered in 1962 by Norman Golb of the University of Chicago. The
names of the Kievan Jews are of Turkic, Slavic, and Hebrew origins, such
as Hanukkah, Yehudah, Gostata, and Kiabar. There is an argument that these
Jews were Israelites who adopted local names, but others argue that they
were Jews of Khazar origin to whom Turkic names were native.

"The new Kievan Letter may thus be said to support, and indeed to
demonstrate, the authenticity of other Hebrew texts pertaining to the
Khazar Jews, and together with them shows that Khazarian Judaism was not
limited to the rulers but, rather, was well rooted in the territories of
Khazaria, reaching even to its border city of Kiev." - Norman Golb and
Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Cornell
University Press, 1982), page 32.

The burial practices of the Khazars were transformed sometime in the
9th century. Shamanistic sun-amulets disappeared from Khazar graves after
the 830s, according to Bozena Werbart, and so did other sorts of items:

"The clear indications of Christian [of Stablo] and al-Faqih that the
Khazars en masse adopted Judaism may be collated with an archaeological
phenomenon. Only quite recently have there been identified graves which
can most probably be ascribed to the Khazars. They are distinguished by a
particular lay-out, being barrows raised over graves which are surrounded
by square or on occasion circular trenches; these trenches are often
filled with the remains of animal sacrifices. There are analogies to this
form of ritual in the homes for the dead in early Turk sites in the Altai
region. The inventories have many features in common with those of other
burials of the Saltovo-Mayatskii culture, such as the riding-gear and
bow-and-arrows of the cavalrymen, together with the skull or skeleton of
his horse, the skeleton being saddled and harnessed. But the graves in
question often, though not invariably, stand out from other
Saltovo-Mayatskii burials by their wealth. One salient feature of these
graves is their lack of inventories datable to the tenth century. The
Byzantine coins are of the late seventh and earlier eighth centuries,
while the belt-mounts, weaponry, and stirrups are of types generally dated
to the eighth and ninth centuries. Even allowing for the approximate
nature of archaeological periodization, the absence of things clearly
datable to the tenth century is noteworthy. It seems reasonable to
conclude that the Khazars as a collective changed to some other form of
burial-ritual. Various explanations for a change might be offered, but one
obvious cause would be the mass-adoption of a religion which disapproved
of horse-sacrifices and burnt offerings. Even had Christian of Stablo
exaggerated in stating that the Khazars adopted 'Judaism in full' in the
860s, their conversion might well have led to the abandonment of some of
the most fragrantly pagan features of their burial-ritual, trenches
forming hollow squares among them." - Jonathan Shepard, "The Khazars'
Formal Adoption of Judaism and Byzantium's Northern Policy." Oxford
Slavonic Papers, New Series 31 (1998): 17.

Khazarian and Hebraic imagery can often be found on the same artifact:

"It is certain that Khazar Jews lived in Phanagoria (Tmutorokan), since
over sixty tombstones bearing Jewish symbols (such as seven-branched
menorahs, shofars, and lulavs) on one side and Turkic tribe symbols
(tamgas) on the other side were found on the Taman peninsula. Many of
these tombstones date from the eighth or ninth century. Khazarian
tombstones on the Crimean peninsula also depict the shofar, menorah, and
staff of Aaron, as well as Turkic tribe symbols... The artifacts from
Taman and Crimea are extremely significant since their tamgas show that
these Jews were ethnic Turks." - Kevin Alan Brook, in The Jews of Khazaria
(Jason Aronson, 1999), page 142

Most importantly, Judaism is almost always noted in our medieval
documentary sources as being the most important religion in the Khazar
kingdom. It is often the only religion cited when referring to the
Khazars. And the Hebrew script is noted as being the script of 10th
century Khazars. Here are some examples:

"At the present time we know of no nation in the world where Christians
do not live. For in the lands of Gog and Magog who are a Hunnish race and
call themselves Gazari there is one tribe, a very belligerent one -
Alexander enclosed them and they escaped - and all of them profess the
Jewish faith. The Bulgars, however, who are of the same race, are now
becoming Christians." (Christian of Stavelot, in Expositio in Matthaeum
Evangelistam, composed circa 864)

"Thus, it is clear that the false doctrine of Jesus in Rome, that of
Moses among the Khazars, [and] that of Mani in [Uyghur-ruled] Turkistan
removed the strength and bravery that they formerly possessed..."
(Denkart, a Persian work)

"All of the Khazars are Jews. But they have been Judaised recently."
(Ibn al-Faqih, a 10th century author)

"One of the Jews undertook the conversion of the Khazars, who are
composed of many peoples, and they were converted by him and joined his
religion. This happened recently in the days of the Abbasids....For this
was a man who came single-handedly to a king of great rank and to a very
spirited people, and they were converted by him without any recourse to
violence and the sword. And they took upon themselves the difficult
obligations enjoined by the law of the Torah, such as circumcision, the
ritual ablutions, washing after a discharge of the semen, the prohibition
of work on the Sabbath and during the feasts, the prohibition of eating
the flesh of forbidden animals according to this religion, and so on."
(Abd al-Jabbar ibn Muhammad al-Hamdani, in his early 11th century work The
Establishment of Proofs for the Prophethood of Our Master Muhammad)

"The Khazars write Hebrew [letters]." (Muhammad ibn Ishaq an-Nadim of
Baghdad, in his late 10th century Kitab al-Fihrist)

The Karaite writer Jacob ben Reuben referred to the Khazars in Sefer
ha-Osher as "a single nation who do not bear the yoke of the exile, but
are great warriors paying no tribute to the Gentiles."

"The Khazar Jews came to the court of Prince Vladimir and said: 'We
have heard that Bulgarians (Muslims) and Christians came to teach you
their religion...We, however, believe in the one God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob.' Vladimir asked them: 'What kind of law do you have?' They
answered: 'We are required to be circumcised, we may not eat pork or hare
meat, and we must observe the Sabbath.' And he asked: 'Where is your
land?' They answered: 'In Jerusalem.' And again he asked: 'It is really
there?' They answered: 'God got angry with our fathers and therefore
scattered us all over the world and gave our land to the Christians.'
Vladimir asked: 'How is it that you can teach people Jewish law even while
God rejected you and scattered you. If God had loved you and your law, you
would not be scattered throughout foreign lands. Or do you wish us
Russians to suffer the same fate?'" (The Russian Chronicle, describing a
visit of Khazar missionaries to Kiev in the year 986)

"The king and his vizier traveled to the deserted mountains on the
seashore, and arrived one night at the cave in which some Jews used to
celebrate the Sabbath. They disclosed their identity to them, embraced
their religion, were circumcised in the cave, and then returned to their
country, eager to learn the Jewish law. They kept their conversion secret,
however, until they found an opportunity of disclosing the fact gradually
to a few of their special friends. When the number had increased, they
made the affair public, and induced the rest of the Khazars to embrace the
Jewish faith. They sent to various countries for scholars and books, and
studied the Torah. Their chronicles also tell of their prosperity, how
they beat their foes, conquered their lands, secured great treasures, how
their army swelled to hundreds of thousands, how they loved their faith,
and fostered such love for the Holy House that they erected a tabernacle
in the shape of that built by Moses. They also honored and cherished the
Israelites who lived among them." (The Kuzari: The Book of Proof and
Argument in Defense of the Despised Faith, a philosophical work composed
in the 12th century by the Sephardic writer Yehuda HaLevi)

"The Khazars have a script which is related to the script of the
Russians [Rus]...The greater part of these Khazars who use this script are
Jews." (Ta'rikh-i Fakhr ad-Din Mubarak Shah, a Persian work composed in
1206)

Khazaria is regarded as the "country of the Jews" (Zemlya Zhidovskaya)
in Russian folk literature (byliny). And the Schechter Letter informs us
that some of the Alan people (neighbors of the Khazars to the south) also
adopted Judaism (see Golb and Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the
Tenth Century, pages 113 and 115).

The Ellend and Chelarevo sites mentioned above are evidence that a
Turkic Jewish group migrated westward from the Khazar empire. There is
also other evidence of this sort. For instance:

"Significant evidence exists that attests to permanent Khazar
settlements in the territory that is now western Belarus. Documents
contained in the Russian Judaica collection of Baron Günzburg (1857-1910)
and Baron Polyakov (Polakoff) indicated that the Khazars founded a glass
factory in Hrodna (Grodno) in the late ninth century or the early tenth
century." (Kevin Alan Brook, in The Jews of Khazaria (Jason Aronson,
1999), page 213)

"Even as late as 1309 a Council of the Hungarian clergy at Pressburg
forbade Catholics to intermarry with those people described as Khazars,
and their decision received papal confirmation in 1346." (Douglas M.
Dunlop, "The Khazars," in The Dark Ages, ed. Roth and Levine (Rutgers
University Press, 1966), page 356)

"A significant fact attesting to continued Magyar-Kabar relations is
the statement of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus that the Magyars and
Khazars learned each others' languages, such that the Khazar language was
spoken in Hungary until at least the middle of the tenth century." (Kevin
Alan Brook, in The Jews of Khazaria (Jason Aronson, 1999), page 208,
referring to the fact that Khazars living in Hungary taught their language
to their Hungarian neighbors)

"The Khazarian population in Hungary further increased in size when the
Hungarian Duke Taksony (reigned 955-970) invited Khazar Jews to settle in
his realm." (Kevin Alan Brook, in The Jews of Khazaria (Jason Aronson,
1999), page 208)

"Around the year 1117, people presumed to be Khazars fled the Cumans
and sought refuge in Kievan Rus from Vladimir Monomakh. These 'Khazars'
settled near Chernihiv (Chernigov), northeast of Kiev, in a new town they
built called Byelaya Vyezha ('White Fortress')." (Kevin Alan Brook, in The
Jews of Khazaria (Jason Aronson, 1999), page 222)

Sketchy information also allows us to posit that a small number of
Khazars reached Moravia and Croatia. Central European Jews in service to
Hasdai ibn Shaprut met a blind Khazarian Jew named Amram circa 947 in an
unknown place, apparently in central Europe (see Kevin Alan Brook, The
Jews of Khazaria, page 131). According to the Life of Methodius, Saint
Methodius met a Khazar named Zambrios in Moravia around 879-880 (see Kevin
Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria, page 124).

The best evidence that Khazars form a portion of modern Ukrainian Jewry
is the fact that Slavic-speaking Jews existed in Kievan Rus. Scholarship
has demonstrated that these Jews were of Khazarian and Byzantine origins,
and thus are distinguished from later immigrants from the West.

PART 2: Scholarly opinions in favor of the Khazar theory

The idea that Khazars contributed to a certain extent to the gene pool
of Eastern European Jewry has been, and still is, championed by a large
number of legitimate folklorists and historians, as well as by popular
authors. Below is a collection of their viewpoints.

"The strangest fact is that the name of the Ashkenazim, the bulk whom I
see as the descendants of the Khazars, points towards the old grounds of
the Khazars around the Caucasus... According to the explanation by the
Talmud, Ashkenaz thus means a country near the Black Sea between Ararat
and the Caucasus, within the original region of the Khazar empire. The
name with which the Sefardim indicate their co-religionists from Poland
already gives the explanation for the real descent, from the countries in
the Caucasus." (Hugo Freiherr von Kutschera, in Die Chasaren: Historische
Studie (Vienna: A. Holzhausen, 1910))

"[Isaac Bär] Levinsohn was the first to express the opinion that the
Russian Jews hailed, not from Germany, as is commonly supposed, but from
the banks of the Volga. This hypothesis, corroborated by tradition,
Harkavy established as a fact. Originally the vernacular of the Jews of
Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev was Russian and Polish, or, rather, the two
being closely allied, Palaeo-Slavonic. The havoc wrought by the Crusades
in the Jewish communities of Western Europe caused a constant stream of
German-Jewish immigrants to pour, since 1090, into the comparatively free
countries of the Slavonians. RussoPoland became the America of the Old
World. The Jewish settlers from abroad soon outnumbered the native Jews,
and they spread a new language and new customs wherever they established
themselves. Whether the Jews of Russia were originally pagans from the
shores of the Black and Caspian Seas, converted to Judaism under the
Khazars during the eighth century, or Palestinian exiles subjugated by
their Slavonian conquerors and assimilated with them, it is indisputable
that they inhabited what we know to-day as Russia long before the
Varangian prince Rurik came, at the invitation of Scythian and Sarmatian
savages, to lay the foundation of the Muscovite empire. In Feodosia there
is a synagogue at least a thousand years old. The Greek inscription on a
marble slab, dating back to 80-81 B. C. E., preserved in the Imperial
Hermitage in St. Petersburg, makes it certain that they flourished in the
Crimea before the destruction of the Temple." (Jacob S. Raisin, in The
Haskalah Movement in Russia (The Jewish Publication Society of America,
1913), pages 18-19)

"We are told of a large tribe of Tartars called the Khazars, who in the
eighth century were converted to Judaism and established a Jewish kingdom
in southern Russia. Although that kingdom was destroyed by the Russians in
the tenth century, no doubt many of the descendants of the Khazars were
still living in the region. And no doubt they readily greeted their
brethren as they came flocking in from Germany." (Lewis Browne, in
Stranger Than Fiction: A Short History of the Jews from Earliest Times to
the Present Day (Macmillan, 1925), pages 237-238)

"The fashion of dismissing the tale about the Khozars as also
incredible and therefore untrue is no longer in vogue. Inasmuch as the
famous poet philosopher Judah Halevi (1085-1140) founded his Cuzari on the
Khozars, the tale was thought to be merely the poetical offspring of his
imagination. But history has now accepted the account as undoubtedly true
and attributes some of the characteristics of the Russian Jew as due to
their descent from Tartars, converted to Judaism, rather than from Jews
even of the lost Ten Tribes." (Elkan Nathan Adler, in Jewish Travelers
(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930), page xiii)

"At about the same time that the Muhammadans had conquered Spain, the
king of a people, called Khazars, had become dissatisfied with worshiping
idols, and had become a Jew. A great many of his lords, generals, and
soldiers had done likewise. Rabbis were then invited to come and teach
Jewish laws and customs to the Jewish Khazars. During the two hundred
years of the existence of this Jewish kingdom, most of the Khazars had
learned the Jewish religion and were living in accordance with its laws.
Hasdai rejoiced greatly to learn of the kingdom of the Khazars.
Unfortunately, the Russians destroyed it a few years later. You are
probably wondering: ''What happened to the Jewish Khazars?'' Some of them
mingled with the other Jews of Russia, and the others || gradually forgot
their Judaism and became Christians." (Mordechai I. Soloff, in How the
Jewish People Grew Up (Cincinnati, OH: The Union of American Hebrew
Congregations, 1936), pages 219, 221)

"Dr. [Itzhak] Schipper believes that diffusion of Jewish Khazarian
elements into the Polish kingdom appeared only after the Khazarian kingdom
fell. A lot of documents and different town-names attest to the early
Jewish immigration to Poland...At the same time there was another Jewish
immigration and colonization from the west, from Germany. Lots of
antagonism existed between the eastern and western Jewish immigrants
because there were different types of city-buildings...Polish land was
covered mostly with forests, especially in the North and West with
wetlands and quagmire, so there was little population. The Khazar people,
usually peasants, used primitive tools and were people with less culture.
There was antagonism with the more advanced German Jews." (E. Ringelblum,
in Z'ydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej, edited by A. Hafftka, Itzhak Schipper, and
A. Tartakower (Warsaw, 1936), page 38)

"In the early Middle Ages a powerful state, inhabited by the Khazars,
existed on the coast of the Black Sea; and early in the eighth century
Buland, ruler of the Khazars, formally adopted the Jewish religion.
Subsequently this country, like so many other areas of Eastern Europe, was
absorbed by the growing power of the Kingdom of Kiev. To the present day
the Mongoloid features noticeable among the Polish Jews would indicate
that, after the downfall of this Eastern European Jewish state, some,
probably the ruling classes, migrated to Poland. Some anthropologists,
however, attribute such features to the Mongol invasions." (Raymond Leslie
Buell, in Poland: Key to Europe (New York, NY: A.A. Knopf, 1939), pages
288-289)

"The capital city and lands of the Chazars were finally captured about
the middle of the tenth century by the Duke of Kiev; the survivors of this
strange kingdom were then scattered through the Crimea, where they were
soon lost to history. Yet even today throughout Southern Russia we find
Jews whose tall figures, sandy hair and high cheek bones suggest that they
may have descended from the almost forgotten Chazars." (Elma Ehrlich
Levinger and Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, in The Story of the Jew for Young
People (New York, NY: Behrman's Jewish Book House, 1940), page 107)

"The Khazar nation was scattered. Some of the people fled to northern
Russia. They may have become the ancestors of certain Jewish groups who
are living at the present time." (Dorothy F. Zeligs, in A History of
Jewish Life in Modern Times for Young People (New York, NY: Bloch
Publishing Company, 1950), page 203)

"The circumstances surrounding the beginnings of Jewish settlement in
Poland remain nebulous, though it is more than a surmise that the first
Jews must have come from the Crimea. After the fall of the Jewish kingdom
of Khazaria, they continued to arrive, fleeing from the Russian boyars of
Kiev who after several centuries of vassalage to the Jewish kings had
finally risen in revolt and conquered them. In time, these Khazar Jews
blended with the other Jewish elements in Poland and ultimately lost their
ethnic group identity." (Nathan Ausubel, in Pictorial History of the
Jewish People (New York, NY: Crown, 1953), page 133)

"The first Jews to settle in Lithuania in the 11th century came from
the land of the Khazars, on the lower Volga River, from Crimea on the
Black Sea and from Bohemia. Originally, the Jews came to the land of the
Khazars from the Byzantine kingdom, where they had been oppressed. The
Khazars had welcomed the Jews and later had been converted to Judaism.
When the Khazars were overrun by the Mongols and Russians, the Jews
settled in Lithuania, whose rulers, at that time, were extremely
tolerant." (Sidney L. Markowitz, in What You Should Know About Jewish
Religion, History, Ethics and Culture (New York, NY: Citadel Press, 1955))

"The immigration (originally transmigration) of Jews to Poland started
in the middle of the IX century. It took place at the same time from
Western Europe and from the East (that is from the state of the Chazars,
whose state religion was Judaism. Chazars was situated in the vicinity of
Kiev and extended to the Dniestr; it ceased to exist in 969)." (Michal M.
Borwicz, in A Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Poland (Paris, 1955))

"But before and after the Mongol upheaval, the Khazars sent many
offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build
up the great Jewish centers of eastern Europe." (Salo Wittmayer Baron, in
A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1957), volume 3, page 206)

"Descendants of the Khazars, men noteworthy for their learning and
piety, were known long after in Toledo...And, to the present day, the
Mongoloid features common amongst the Jews of eastern Europe are, in all
probability, a heritage from these 'proselytes of righteousness' of ten
centuries ago." (Cecil Roth, in A Short History of the Jewish People
(London: Horovitz [East and West Library], 1959), page 288)

"In the same period there began an influx of Chazar Jews from the East.
At first this was essentially a trade immigration, but towards the end of
the 10th century, after the fall of the Chazar state, it assumed larger
proportions. The immigrants of this period turned mainly to agriculture
and handicrafts. These colonies or settlements occurred in the southern
and eastern parts of the future Polish state." (Kazimierz and Maria
Piechotka, in Wooden Synagogues (Warsaw: Arkady, 1959; originally appeared
in a Polish-language edition), English edition, page 9)

"The Khazars were a warlike people, and succeeded in extending their
rule and influence. They were subjected to occasional attacks by the
Byzantines and later by the Russians. By the end of the 10th century they
succumbed to the Russians, and after maintaining themselves for a short
period in the Crimea, some gradually embraced the Christian or Moslem
faith, ceasing to exist as a separate people, though many joined with
their Jewish brethren." (David Bridger and Samuel Wolk (editors), in
article "Khazars" (pp. 265-266) in The New Jewish Encyclopedia (New York,
NY: Behrman House, 1962), page 266)

"Far away, on the steppes of Southern Russia, a whole nation had been
converted to Judaism several hundred years ago. Could it be true? Hasdai
sends a letter to the king of this foreign people, the Chazars, and
receives an answer: the story is true...They were to exist to the
thirteenth century, when they were defeated, their remnants joining the
Jewish or Christian communities." (Leo Trepp, in Eternal Faith, Eternal
People: A Journey into Judaism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1962), page 143)

"Polish scholars agree that these oldest [Polish Jewish] settlements
were founded by Jewish emigres from the Khazar state and Russia, while the
Jews from Southern and Western Europe began to arrive and settle only
later...and that a certain portion at least of the Jewish population (in
earlier times, the main bulk) originated from the east, from the Khazar
country, and later from Kievian Russia." (Adam Vetulani, in his article
"The Jews of Mediaeval Poland," in Jewish Journal of Sociology, volume 4
(December, 1962), page 274)

"In Khazaria, perched precariously on the trackless steppe extending
between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, Jewish merchants and refugees
from the persecutions of the Byzantine Empire managed to convert the king,
many of his nobles, and a considerable portion of the nomadic, Khazarian
population...With the disappearance of the Khazarian kingdom under the
blows of the Russians, the Jews and Jewish Khazars settled in the Crimea,
in Hungary, and in Lithuania." (Jacob Berhard Agus, in The Meaning of
Jewish History (New York, NY: Abelard-Schuman, 1963), page 237)

"It is clear, however, that the influence of the Jews, who had become
the most active agents of the commerce of the Caliphate, was substantial
in the Khazar kingdom, and it is probable that the commonly observed
mongoloid type among East European Jews, particularly in the Ukraine,
Poland and Roumania, derives from the conversions and intermarriages which
were no doubt frequent in the swarming trading camps of the Khaqans." (W.
E. D. Allen, in The Ukraine (New York, NY: Russell and Russell, 1963),
pages 8-9)

"Meanwhile the bulk of the victims of expulsion, massacre, and
persecution were to be found in the territory between the Black Sea and
the Baltic, most of which was part of the kingdom of Poland. There
European Jews had met another strand of the Jewish people, Jews who had
entered the same area from the south and east. Jewish colonies on the
Black Sea and in the Crimea dated back to very early times, and the
kingdom of the Khazars || had left many Jewish relics in lands which are
now Ukrainian." (James Parkes, in A History of the Jewish People (Chicago,
IL: Quadrangle Books, 1963), pages 105-106)

"Driven out of their country by the Cumans in the 12th century, part of
the last Jewish Khazars settled in Poland." (Francoise Godding-Ganshof, in
article "Khazars" (pp. 214-215) in Chamber's Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (Oxford,
England: Pergamon Press, 1966), page 215)

"It is likely too that some Khazar progeny reached the various Slavic
lands where they helped to build the great Jewish centers of Eastern
Europe." (Abba Solomon Eban, in My People: The Story of the Jews (New
York, NY: Behrman House, 1968), page 150)

"It would of course be foolish to deny that Jews of different origin
also contributed to the existing Jewish world-community. The numerical
ratio of the Khazar to the Semitic and other contributions is impossible
to establish. But the cumulative evidence makes one inclined to agree with
the consensus of Polish historians that 'in earlier times the main bulk
originated from the Khazar country'; and that, accordingly, the Khazar
contribution to the genetic make-up of the Jews must be substantial, and
in all likelihood dominant." (Arthur Koestler, in The Thirteenth Tribe:
The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (London: Hutchinson, 1976 and New York,
NY: Random House, 1976), page 180) Note Arthur Koestler was murdered by
the Jews for writing his books.

"...it may be stated at present that well-documented findings
concerning the culture of the Jewries of western Europe in the Middle
Ages, as well as evidence leading directly to the recognition of the
movement eastward of important segments of those Jewries during late
medieval times, leave no room for the hypothesis that the Jews of post
medieval Europe were descended primarily from the Khazars. That, however,
those among the Khazars who adopted Judaism as their religion came to form
a part of the Ukrainian component of eastern European Jews, and eventually
to be assimilated by it, can hardly be doubted on the basis of our present
state of knowledge." (Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, in Khazarian Hebrew
Documents of the Tenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1982), page xv. In later separate writings by Golb (Jewish Proselytism,
1988) and Pritsak ("The Pre-Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe in Relation
to the Khazars, the Rus' and the Lithuanians." In Ukrainian-Jewish
Relations in Historical Perspective, 1990), however, the lying view that
virtually no Jews are descended from the Khazars is expressed)

"There is little reason to doubt that Jews had lived in Poland from the
earliest times, and that Judaism, as preserved by the descendants of the
ancient Chazar kingdom in the southeast, had actually antedated
Christianity." (Norman Davies, in God's Playground: A History of Poland,
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), volume 1, page 79)

"The Khazar Jewish kingdom was a fascinating episode in Russian Jewish
History...The Jews dispersed into Russia, Armenia, Byzantium, and the
Mediterranean coast. It is likely that many of the Jews of these regions
are descended from Khazar refugees." (Richard Haase, in Jewish Regional
Cooking (Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1985), page 56)

"Poland was Christianized in 966 A.D., at a time when Jews already
lived there. The first ones came from the Khazar state of Russia and
Kievan Rus. Late in the eleventh century, Jews fleeing from persecution in
southern and western Europe arrived. Not, however, until the fifteenth
century did large numbers of Jews begin to live in Poland." (Meyer
Weinberg, in Because They Were Jews: A History of Anti-Semitism (Greenwood
Press, 1986), page 153)

"East European Jews, especially the Ukrainian, Moldovian (Bessarabian),
Azerbaijanian, Georgian, and Armenian Jews are actually a fusion of
Byzantine-Greek Jews, Babylonian Jews from the Abbasid Caliphate,
Yiddish-speaking German-Polish Jews, sixteenth Century Sephardic Jews
fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and Khazars. This is the bloodline of
these Russian Jews...However, the most strongly Khazar of the Jews are
undoubtedly the Hungarian Jews, descendants of the last Khazars who fled
into Hungary about 1200-1300, where they were received by their former
vassals, the Magyar kings. The Hungarian Jews are definitely a fusion of
Semitic German Jews and the Turkic Khazars with some Sephardic immigrants
who came to Hungary by way of Italy in the 1500's escaping the Spanish
Inquisition." (Monroe Rosenthal and Isaac Mozeson, in Wars of the Jews: A
Military History from Biblical to Modern Times (New York, NY: Hippocrene
Books, 1990), page 224)

"As the conquering Lithuanians moved south through Byelorussia,
Volkynia, and the Ukraine, they came upon towns with either established
Jewish communities or a Jewish presence. These communities were
established by a mixture of Jews who came via Khazaria, Khazarian Jews and
Jews who came directly from older communities. What was the proportion of
each or their numbers is not known." (Stuart and Nancy Schoenburg, in
Lithuanian Jewish Communities (New York, NY: Garland, 1991 and Northvale,
NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), page 10)

"Jews are the largest and most important of these
nationalities...According to some historians, many of them are descended
from the Khazars, a people who ruled much of the Volga-Dnieper basin the
seventh to ninth centuries and converted to Judaism en masse in the eighth
century. Others are descended from a large colony of Jews who settled in
Ukraine when it was ruled by a religiously tolerant Poland." (William G.
Andrews, in The Land and People of the Soviet Union (New York, NY:
HarperCollins, 1991), page 183)

"It is very likely that Judaised Khazar elements, especially those that
had acculturated to the cities, contributed to the subsequently
Slavic-speaking Jewish communities of Kievan Rus'. These were ultimately
absorbed by Yiddish-speaking Jews entering the Ukraine and Belorussia from
Poland and Central Europe. In the same way, one may conjecture that Khazar
Muslims contributed to the Turkic-speaking and Turko-Muslim communities of
the Volga basin and North Caucasus." (Peter Benjamin Golden, in An
Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (Wiesbaden, Germany:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), pages 243-244)

"How and why Jews first reached Lithuania is a matter of informed
hypothesis. Historian Abraham Elijahu Harkavi maintains that they came
from Babylonia and elsewhere in the Near East in the ninth and tenth
centuries C.E., after the decline of the Jewish communities there. Harkavi
also believes that Jews reached Lithuania from the shortlived but
flourishing Jewish state of the Khazars, who were among the founders of
Kiev in 865. The Khazars lost their kingdom in 969 to the Russian princes,
who introduced the Russian Orthodox Church... Thus inspired, the Russians
expelled the Jews...who moved en masse to the then-Lithuanian towns of
Gardinas (Grodno), Minsk, Pinsk..." (Masha Greenbaum, in The Jews of
Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable Community 1316-1945 (Jerusalem:
Gefen, 1995), page 2)

"It is in the fusion of autochthonous Jews with semi-Jewish Khazars and
Kabars in the tenth century that we must seek the earliest demographic
basis of the Jewish population of medieval Hungary." (Raphael Patai, in
The Jews of Hungary (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996),
page 29)

"...one should remember that the Khazars were described by several
contemporary authors as having a pale complexion, blue eyes, and reddish
hair. Red, as distinguished from blond, hair is found in a certain
percentage of East European Jews, and this, as well as the more
generalized light coloring, could be a heritage of the medieval Khazar
infusion." (Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai, in The Myth of the Jewish
Race (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), page 72)

"Jews from central Europe first settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
in the second half of the 14th century. Early examples are the communities
of Brest-Litovsk and Grodno, established by Jews from Poland with charters
from Duke Vitold, similar to those granted by Bolislav the Pious to Jews
of Great Poland. Among the Jews of the southwestern districts of the
Lithuanian Duchy, annexed to the Kingdom of Poland toward the end of the
14th century, were descendants of Jews from oriental countries, including
a few of Khazar stock. They differed from the Ashkenazis in both language
and cultural traditions." (Shmuel Arthur Cygielman, in Jewish Autonomy in
Poland and Lithuania until 1648 (5408) (Jerusalem, 1997))

"Eventually, the Khazaria kingdom fell. Evidently, some of its Jewish
population went to Eastern Europe and the rest disappeared." (Lawrence
Jeffrey Epstein, in Questions and Answers on Conversion to Judaism
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1998), page 176)

"Jewish-Khazarian settlement in Kiev can be traced to the 10th century;
the Russian-speaking community was later absorbed by Yiddish-speaking
immigrants from Central Europe." (in the entry "Ukraine" in The Shengold
Jewish Encyclopedia, edited by Klenicki, Schiff, and Schreiber (Schreiber
Publishing, 1998), page 267)

"The descendants of the Khazars reached eastern and central Europe.
There is substantial evidence that some of them settled in Slavic lands,
where they took part in establishing the major Jewish centers of eastern
Europe...It is also widely believed that many Khazar Jews fled to Poland
to avoid forced baptism. Moreover, some of the groups that migrated from
eastern to central Europe have been called Khazars and may have originated
in the former Khazar empire. Some apparently fled into northern Hungary,
where, to this day, there are villages that bear such names as Kozar and
Kozardie." (Robert and Elinor Slater, in Great Moments in Jewish History
(Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David, 1999), page 87)

"Unfortunately, in 1016 C.E., the Russians, with the help of Byzantium,
crushed the Khazar kingdom and brought it to a close. What happened to all
the Khazar Jews, both the descendants of the converts and the settlers, is
shrouded in mystery. They were certainly dispersed in many of the
neighboring lands. It is conceivable, according to some scholars, that
some of them are the forebears of the Polish and Russian Jews of previous
generations. Who knows? If your ancestors came from these lands, you may
have the blood of kings in you - not David and Solomon, but kings who
voluntarily chose to join the fate of a people whose religion they
acknowledged as true." (Benjamin Blech, in The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Jewish History and Culture (Alpha Books, 1999), pages 161-162)

"Before they arrived in present-day Hungary, the Magyars had lived in
Central Asia relatively near the famous Khazars, who had converted to
Judaism in the eighth century. When the Magyars left the area, many Khazar
Jews joined them on their trek westward. In southern Hungary,
archaeologists discovered a Khazar ring engraved with Hebrew letters.
These Khazars joined the pre-existing Jews of Hungary and formed
communities in the main cities, including Buda." (Eli Valley, in The Great
Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson,
1999), page 377)

"Thus, the Ashkenazic ethnogenesis, having been formed by migrations
from the East (Khazaria), West (e.g., Germany, Austria, Bohemia), and
South (e.g., Greece, Mesopotamia, Khorasan), is more complex than
previously envisioned." (Kevin Alan Brook, in The Jews of Khazaria
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1999), page xv)

"During the Middle Ages, a large group of Jews came from Germany and
eastern lands to Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine...Another group
emanated from the lands of the Khazars, relates the Encyclopedia Judaica."
(Ben G. Frank, in A Travel Guide to Jewish Russia and Ukraine (Gretna, LA:
Pelican, 1999), page 63)

"In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as the Khazar state
disintegrated, and into the thirteenth century, as the Cuman and Mongol
hordes pushed large numbers of refugees westward, Khazar and
Khazar-influenced groups professing Judaism - including the probably
highly committed Levites - migrated into Eastern Europe, where they mixed
with other Jewish groups moving east from Germany and north from Italy."
(David Keys, in Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the
Modern World (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2000), pages 100-101)

"During their period of decline many Khazars were killed in battle,
sold into slavery, or forced to convert to Islam or Christianity. A
sizable number probably intermarried with the Crimean Jews. Others fled to
the West (meaning Poland and southern Russia) where they intermarried with
Ashkenazi Jews." (Ken Blady, in Jewish Communities in Exotic Places
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2000), page 118)

"...the 18th-century Yiddish-speaking Jews who lived in German- and
Slavic-speaking areas and considered themselves Ashkenazic, actually were
descended from three independent sources. The first, very important
source, was the Rhineland in western Germany; the second one was the area
of the modern Czech Republic, an area that medieval Jewish rabbinic
literature called 'West Canaan.' The third and marginal center called
'East Canaan' corresponded to modern Ukraine in which one part of the Jews
were of Khazarian origin." (Alexander Beider, in his article "The
Influence of Migrants from Czech Lands on Jewish Communities in Central
and Eastern Europe," in Avotaynu, volume 16, number 2 (Summer 2000), page
20)

"When, in 1016, a joint Russian and Byzantine army defeated the already
much weakened Khazar army, these 'Khazar' Jews were forced to flee once
more...These Jews were no longer simply the descendants of Jewish refugees
from Greece and Persia. Intermarriage with original Khazars who had been
converted to Judaism had introduced central Asian features, high
cheek-bones and Oriental eyes... With the destruction of Khazaria some of
the Jews found their way back to Greece and the Mediterranean, exiles once
more. But many must have taken back with their Russian conquerors to the
lands of southern Russia - to Kiev and Kharkov... The Khazar Jews who
settled in Russia were not particularly liked or welcomed. Such historical
records as survive show for example that a hundred years after their
arrival anti-Jewish riots broke out in Kiev itself and many were
killed...Meanwhile, in the very same years that the defeated Jewish
Khazars - and there was a second Khazar Diaspora following the Mongol
invasion of the area in the thirteenth century - were finding new homes in
southern Russia, another group of Jews, numerically much larger, were
being driven out of their homes, along the river Rhine." (Martin Gilbert,
in Letters to Auntie Fori: 5000 Years of Jewish History (New York, NY:
Schocken, 2002), pages 147-148)

There are also similar sentiments in many other works by other authors.
For instance, J.S. Hertz, a Yiddish-language historian, in Di Yidn in
Ukrayne: fun di eltste tsaytn biz nokh tah vetat (New York: Unzer tsayt
farlag, 1949), argued that most Ukrainian Jews and many other Eastern
European Jews are Khazarian. Abraham N. Poliak, a Hebrew-language
historian from Israel, wrote a book Kazariyah (first published in the
1940s) in which he argues that Eastern European Jews are predominantly
Khazarian. Arthur Koestler borrowed heavily from Poliak's works when
writing The Thirteenth Tribe during 1973 and 1974. Early proponents of the
Khazar theory included the Polish Jewish scholars Tadeusz Czacki
(1765-1813) and Max (Maksymilian) Gumplowicz (1864-1897), the Ukrainian
Jewish scholar Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788-1860), and the Russian Jewish
doctor/anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg (1867-?). Itzhak Schipper
(1884-1943), a Polish Jewish historian who wrote in Polish and Yiddish,
argued that the Polish Jews are largely Khazarian. The quote I gave from
Piechotka and Piechotka is influenced by Schipper's opinion of what
happened to the Khazars. Samuel V. Kurinsky, an American archaeologist
with extensive knowledge of Jewish history, said that Jews from Khazaria
settled in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland in his 1991 book The Glassmakers.

Then there are the works of Abraham Elija Harkavy, a Russian-language
historian of the late 19th century who was familiar with some of the basic
Hebrew sources for Khazarian history. I have already quoted from
Greenbaum, who summarizes his views. Harkavy's theory that Khazarian and
Middle-Eastern Jews came into Poland is supportable by a number of
factors, and may yet gain added credence if Yaffa Eliach is correct in
saying (in her 1998 book There Once Was A World: A 900-Year Chronicle of
the Shtetl of Eishyshok) that the first five Jewish families to settle in
the town of Eishyshok in Lithuania came from Babylonia. Since Eliach
(whose family spoke Yiddish just like other Lithuanian Jews) herself
claims descent from these Oriental Jews, that is perhaps another clue that
Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews are the descendants of multiple
migrations from diverse locations and not simply late-medieval arrivals
from Germany. And there are many other historians and archaeologists who
have argued that Russian and Polish Jews derive in part from Oriental and
Khazarian Jews.

PART 3: Notable modern Jews and Jewish communities who claim Khazar
ancestry

Dan Rottenberg, author of "Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish
Genealogy" (1st edition, 1977), has ancestors from the Austrian and
Russian empires. Some of his wife's ancestors were allegedly Khazars.
Karen De Witt, in The Washington Post, wrote the following on page B3, in
the Saturday, August 20, 1977 issue, in her article "Family Lore and the
Search for Jewish 'Roots'": "Rottenberg, who has traced his and his wife's
family back to the early 1800s and found one line that goes back to the
Khazar kingdom in the Crimea, which dates to the 8th century, notes that
there is only a finite number of Jews in the world." And Rottenberg wrote
in his book "Finding Our Fathers" on page 45: "In any case, some East
European Jews, and perhaps a great many, are descended from the Khazars.
Figuring out whether you are or aren't of Khazar ancestry may be
impossible, but some families seem to have clues. For example, a branch of
my wife's family named Tamarin, from Russia, maintains that the family
came into Judaism via the Khazar conversion and that the family took its
name from Tamara, queen of Georgia in the thirteenth century."

The family of Ehud Ya'ari, a top Israeli journalist who produced the
1997 documentary Memlekhet ha-Kuzarim, also claims some Khazarian roots.
Michael Ajzenstadt, in The Jerusalem Post, wrote the following on page 5
in the March 17, 1997 issue, in his article "An Incredible Journey to the
Lost Empire of the Khazars": "[Ehud Ya'ari is quoted as saying:] "As a
child I heard that our family has some Khazarian blood and for 30 years
now I have been trying to find information about this exciting
subject...[I am] a soldier in the last battle of the Khazar kingdom, a
battle for the right to be remembered...And finally I would like to secure
funds to continue excavations in several places, which looked quite
promising. My sexiest dream is to find the actual tomb of one of the
Khazar kings. I believe that if we achieve that it will be as important-at
least as the discovery of Troy or of the treasures of the Pharaohs in the
Pyramids."

Some Jews from the shtetl Kurilovich, in Moldova, claim "Tartar"
ancestry:

"In 1923, my father, who was born in the Jewish colonies of Baron
Hirsch, visited the small-town of Kurilovich, near Kishinev, between
Moldavia and Bessarabia, from where their parents had come to Argentina.
Old relatives of the town assured him that the family lived there for 500
years, and added this phrase that fed my fantasies for a long time: 'We
are Jewish Tartars'. The 5 centuries would correspond exactly to the time
at which the descendants of the Khazars dispersed from Crimea. And the
usage of 'Tartars' instead of 'Khazars'? Perhaps a slip of the tongue and
of the memory, that the historians will not delay in correcting." - Alicia
Dujovne Ortiz, "El fantasma de los jázaros", La Nación (Buenos Aires,
Argentina, August 19, 1999).

A relative of a Transylvanian Jew who has been in touch with me once
told him "We are not Semites - we are white Turks from far to the East,
and our homes were destroyed by the Russians." These are the Jews of the
town Sfîntu Gheorghe in what is now Romania. Though their community had
intermingled with some Hungarians and Romanians, they remained a cohesive
community with knowledge of its Turkic origins for centuries. In the 1990s
a genealogical expedition hired by my Transylvanian Jewish acquaintance
found confirmation of the tradition that these Jews are Turkic. That does
not prove that they were Khazars. They could have been Tatars or Kipchaks
(Cumans) or Oghuzes. But most likely they were Khazars, as the Khazars
converted to standard Judaism in larger numbers than any other Turkic
group.

There are also isolated cases of Jews from certain towns in Ukraine and
Lithuania who claim Khazar ancestry. Stories like these help to contradict
the opinion of Leon Wieseltier in "You Don't Have to Be Khazarian: The
Thirteenth Tribe, by Arthur Koestler" (New York Review of Books, October
28, 1976) on page 34 that there are no memories of a Khazar heritage among
any modern Jews.

PART 4: Arguments against the Khazar theory

1). Judaism was never widespread in Khazaria, having been limited only
to the ruling classes. FALSE

2). Ibn Rustah's account accurately describes the Jewish phase of
Khazar life (10th century) and since he says most Khazars followed the
Turkic religion the Khazars were not Jews. FALSE

3). The idea that Khazars migrated westward is not supported by any
scholars. FALSE

4). The idea that Khazars migrated westward is not backed by any
evidence. FALSE

5). Khazars never lived in Kiev. FALSE

6). The Khazars were really Karaites, not Rabbinites. FALSE

7). The modern Karaims speak Turkic, and the Khazars spoke Turkic, so
they must be one and the same people with the same type of Turkic. FALSE

8). All the Khazars became Orthodox Christians, none remaining Jews.
FALSE

9). All the Khazars became Muslims, none remaining Jews. FALSE

10). There were no recognizable Khazars alive after the 11th century.
FALSE

11). No Turkic words exist in the Yiddish language. FALSE

12). The Khazars were not a highly cultured people. FALSE

13). The Byzantines and the Khazars were allies in the 8th and early
9th centuries - how was this possible if the Khazars were really Jews and
the Byzantines were Christians? FALSE CHRONOLOGY

14). There are no modern Jews who remember their Khazar heritage. FALSE

15). No Polish place-names were named after the Khazars. TRUE

16). Polish shtetl life did not derive from the Khazars. TRUE

17). The majority of Polish Jews came from the West, not the East. TRUE

18). Most Ashkenazi Jews have Germanic, not Turkic, surnames and
customs. TRUE

19). If the Ashkenazi Jews are genetically Israelites, then it is not
possible that they had any ancestors who lived in the Khazar kingdom.
FALSE BECAUSE KHAZARIA WAS A DESTINATION FOR THE JEWISH DIASPORA

Often the primary argument against the Khazar theory is the claim that
Judaism never was widespread in the Khazar kingdom and even if it was it
was allegedly of a syncretic (mixed) nature rather than pure Judaism. For
instance, Nicholas de Lange, in Atlas of the Jewish World (1984), on page
43 writes:

"The Khazar kingdom contained many different ethnic and religious
groups, and there is no evidence of a substantial Jewish element among the
population. The Judaism of the ruling Khazars was mingled with extraneous
beliefs and practices, and the principal center of Judaism in Iraq never
seems to have taken a serious interest in the 'Jewish empire' to the
north...but it is clear that the Khazars were not at all integrated into
the Jewish world, and they must be considered something of a curiosity.
Nothing is known for certain about their ultimate fate."

It should be added that De Lange also contributed to another Jewish
atlas during the 1990s, The Illustrated History of the Jewish People, in
which the Khazars are totally disregarded, except for a brief mention in
the introduction, where they are irrationally dismissed as having been
irrelevant to Jewish history. Khazaria, according to the atlas, "was a
marginal and little-known entity." Strange, then, how famous and
influential Jews like Saadiah Gaon in Babylonia and Hasdai ibn Shaprut in
Spain knew about them. Robert M. Seltzer claimed: "The Judaism of the
Khazars has been much discussed but the historical evidence is very
limited. Only the ruling class of the Khazars became Jews..." (Jewish
People, Jewish Thought, published by Macmillan in 1980, page 787 in note
7).

Rabbi Bernard Rosensweig is one of the biggest opponents of the Khazar
theory, and authored the article "The Thirteenth Tribe, the Khazars and
the Origins of East European Jewry" which appeared in Tradition 16:5 (Fall
1977): 139-162. On pages 154-155 he writes:

"We have exposed the weaknesses of the Khazar hypothesis and the fact
that it stands on wobbly scholarly foundations without historical
support."

Does it, in fact, have all of the weaknesses that Rosensweig claims
that it does? We will see that Rosensweig has some legitimate arguments
against Koestler's presentation of the Khazar theory, yet he also makes
certain arguments that are disputable. For instance on page 146 he argues:

"The truth of the matter is that the Khazar Jews in Khazaria
represented only a minority of the population. The Khazar conversion to
Judaism proceeded from the royal house to the ranks of the nobility and
the upper classes, without ever including the broad masses of the Khazar
people. Dunlop quite correctly points out that the Judaising of the
general populace, if it was ever seriously undertaken, never proceeded
very far, since even in the tenth century the Moslems and the Christians
greatly outnumbered the Jews."

And on page 147 he repeats:

"The great number of Khazars who populated Khazaria at its height were,
in the main, not Jewish Khazars; and, consequently, the use of the name
Khazar in any given context does not necessarily refer to or imply Khazar
Jews."

The problem with Rosensweig's argument is that he confuses the Khazars
with other inhabitants of the empire. Almost all of the sources refer to
Muslims and Christians in the population without saying that they were
necessarily Turkic Khazars. But we do know the identities of these
non-Jews: they were Slavic pagans, Greek Christians, Gothic Christians,
Iranian Muslims, Bulgar Shamanists, Hungarian pagans, and others. When the
Khazars are invoked in particular, their Judaism is almost always
mentioned, as in Christian of Stavelot, Ibn al-Faqih, Al-Masudi, Abraham
Ibn Daud, Yehuda HaLevi, and so on. What is more, Khazar Judaism did not
merely exist in the Khazar capital, Atil, or among Crimean and Daghestani
princes and warriors, but also in the Don valley and in Kiev and
elsewhere, as newly uncovered evidence is revealing.

Some scholars have expressed negative opinions of a Khazar-Ashkenazic
theme without discussing any specifics nor acknowledging that any
reputable writers think differently today. The common thread of this
assortment of opinions is an absolute negative statement on the idea.
Daniel Lasker's entry "Khazars" in The Encyclopedia of Judaism (1989), on
page 414 reads:

We also read in A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People (1992), ed.
Barnavi, on page 118:

"Then, in the eighth century, the ruling class of the Khazar kingdom in
the steppes of southern Russia converted to Judaism. Some legends trace
the origins of Polish Jewry to this Turkic people, but there is no
historical evidence to corroborate such theories."

Bernard Lewis also put forth a one-sided argument: "[The Khazar
theory], first put forth by an Austrian anthropologist in the early years
of this century, is supported by no evidence whatsoever. It has long since
been abandoned by all serious scholars in the field..." (Semites and
Anti-Semites, 1987, page 48). Similarly, Louis Jacobs wrote: "There is a
solid basis in fact behind the stories circulating in the Middle Ages that
a king of the Khazars and his people with him converted to
Judaism...Arthur Koestler's attempt (The Thirteenth Tribe, London, 1976)
to show that all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars is purely
speculative, has nothing to commend it, and is repudiated by all Khazar
scholars." (Oxford Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion, Oxford
University Press, 1999, page 124). This is not much better than Lewis'
statement. No evidence in favor? No one knowledgeable thinks Khazars were
connected to Ashkenazi Jews, after reviewing the pros and cons? I feel
that these absolute statements are unwarranted. They may indicate that
many scholars simply aren't aware of new facts which support the Khazar
theory of westward migrations. Also, they contradict Denis Sinor's
statement in many editions of Encyclopedia Britannica: "A few scholars
have asserted that the Judaised Khazars were the remote ancestors of many
of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia."

A particularly absurd treatment of the Khazars is contained in Yo'av
Karny's travelog The Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of
Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) where Karny tries
repeatedly to attack claims for the partial Khazar heritage of Mountain
Jews, Kumyks, and Ashkenazi Jews, because he thinks the idea of a Khazar
heritage is dangerous to contemporary politics, especially in Daghestan
where the Tenglik Party - led by Salau Aliyev, who believes he is
Khazarian - seeks to form a Kumyk-led independent state, and in Balkaria
where the Balkars claim descent from Bulgars. He actually states that he
cannot understand why anyone would think the study of history is of any
importance (page 129).

Here are some of his outlandish quotes: "Precious little is known about
the Khazars, and the mindful reader need not be misled by encyclopedia
entries about them, even when accompanied by maps and replete with names
and dates. None of this abundant printed material is based on eyewitness
accounts or conclusive archaeological findings." (page 131) This is most
definitely false, as I proved in my book The Jews of Khazaria, which
covers two centuries of grand discoveries in Khazar studies. Then Karny
writes: "Nothing sums up the state of our knowledge of the Khazars better
than the Serb author Milorad Pavic's vignette about a diplomatic
delegation that the Khazar king sent to Byzantium in the ninth century.
The entire history of his people was tattooed on one of his envoy's skin.
Known as the 'great parchment,' that priceless source, the missing part in
the puzzle, gradually peeled off...So was destroyed our only firsthand
account." (page 131).

This is complete bunk; Pavic invented the parchment out of his own
creative mind, and there exist many surviving documents from Khazar times
including by Ibn Fadlan, King Joseph, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, Masudi,
Istakhri, anonymous writers, and others. Karny is misled on page 134 by a
professor of history in Makhachkala, Gadzhi Saidovich Fedorov-Gusseinov,
who denies that there is evidence for Khazars ever living in Daghestan,
and who considers the primary Arabic sources on the Khazars to be
"hearsay", and who doesn't even think that the Kumyks are descended from
Turks. Karny accepted this pseudoscholar Fedorov-Gusseinov's ideas without
getting a second opinion from reliable historians who actually know
something about Khazars. (Amazingly, after building a case against Kumyks
being old Turks and Khazars, Karny contradicts himself later in the book,
on page 222, by saying "The Kumyks, a Turkic people, were among the first
in the Caucasus to convert to Islam, perhaps as early as the tenth
century.") Then, in typical revisionist fashion, following in the
footsteps of ignorant dead writers like Bernard Weinryb and Chaim Rabin,
he attempts to deny the Jewishness of the Khazars and the importance of
the Khazar state to Jewish history. He does this by considering the
conversion of the Khazar people to be merely a "tale". Here is a sentiment
of his quite typical of historical deniers: "At no time that I recall were
my schoolmates and I ever told... that the Jewishness of the Khazars was
at best very selective and at worst highly questionable. The 'mass
conversion' of the Khazars generated a host of outlandish theories about
the Khazar ancestry of the majority of Ashkenazi Jews...Khazaria, Koestler
wrote in apparent seriousness, represented 'the Third World' of the early
Middle Ages, striving for nonalignment, treading carefully between
empires..." (page 132) However, Khazar Judaism represents an historical
fact, and historians today believe it is true that the Khazars merged with
Ashkenazi Jews. As Karny says on pages 132-133, there are some people who
misuse Khazar history, but I would argue that there is never any excuse
for ignoring the historical record simply because it's inconvenient or
even potentially hazardous. Karny also makes a false statement on page
133, where he claims that Ibn Hawkal did not write contemporary to the
time of Samandar. Because Karny is afraid of the possible link between
Khazars and East European Jews and Mountain Jews, he has put "mass
conversion" in quotes and led readers to believe that it is all simply
myth and legend, that we really know nothing about Khazars. What is
hilarious is that Karny contradicts his own sentiments concerning Israel
(in the Prologue on page xxiii he argues that Jerusalem and Israel aren't
as antique as Israeli Zionists claim) and proselytism (on page 346 he
writes about how Jews are reluctant to seek and welcome converts). Yet he
is both defending the Israeliteness of the Israelis by excluding the
Khazars as well as expressing denial that the Khazars were really Jews.
Karny's ludicrous book has been denounced by several experts on the
Khazars.

Another absurd book is Ilan Halevi's English history of the Jews, which
attacks not only Koestler but also the great scholar Dunlop "and those who
think like them." Halevi is incredibly inaccurate when it comes to
describing the history and society of the Khazars, Cossacks, etc.

In short, as we will see further below, hardly any statement made
against the Khazar theory can be left unchallenged, because they are full
of falsehoods and written for reasons other than in the spirit of
objective scholarly inquiry. An exception is the brilliant Swedish
archaeologist Bozena Werbart, whose knowledge of the Khazars is vast. She
writes:

"In the Khazar kingdom, Koestler wanted to see the origin of the
eastern European Jewry. Nevertheless, all the historical and linguistic
facts contradicted his theories. Today the majority of scholars consider
that the Khazaric elements in the Jewish eastern European immigrations
were of insignificant character...According to many researchers, to
associate the Khazars with a modern eastern European Jewish population is
an impossible and unnecessary task..." ("Khazars or 'Saltovo-Mayaki
Culture'? Prejudices about Archaeology and Ethnicity", Current Swedish
Archaeology 4 (1996): 202).

Fair enough, but what are the historical and linguistic facts that
contradict the idea that the Khazars merged with the Ashkenazi Jews? I
don't see any in her essay, so I can't take her argument at face value.
And I'm not impressed by the use of numbers. This is not a popularity
contest. I don't care what percentage of scholars agree with the Khazar
theory or not. I am interested only in discovering the truth. I happen to
have access to more information about the Khazars than those scholars who
don't agree with the Khazar theory. Why should I disregard what I've
learned for the sake of consensus? The same may be said of objections to
the Khazar theory by the distinguished historians Meyer Balaban (circa
1930s) and Bernard Dov Weinryb (circa 1950s-1970s). They wrote their
opinions before all we know about the Khazars today had been discovered
and published, and the latter systematically denied the existence of
Jewish communities in post-Khazar Kievan Rus to an extreme extent. Zvi
Ankori's arguments, published in an old book about Ashkenazic Jewish
genetics, are not that convincing either.

But a reliable historian, András Róna-Tas, also agreed with these other
writers:

"The great majority of the Jewry, which had until then lived under the
shelter of Arab rule, fled eastward to escape the new inquisition [in
Spain]. Passing through the Ottoman Turkish Empire, they reached the
territory of today's Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, where they met with
Jews who had been continuously migrating there through Germany since the
12th century. East European Jews thus migrated from the west to the east
of the continent, and were not descended from the inhabitants of the
Khazar Empire." (Hungarians and Europe in the Early Middle Ages, CEU
Press, 1999, English edition, page 91).

Another reliable historian, Nora Berend, wrote in her book At the Gate
of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and 'Pagans' in Medieval Hungary c. 1000-c.
1300 (Cambridge University Press, 2001, page 61):

"All the evidence used to support the thesis of Jewish Khazars in
Hungary is questionable. Two rings with Hebrew letters were found in a
Hungarian cemetery (from the second half of the eleventh c.) near villages
that were probably settled by tribes from the Khazar Empire. The rings
could have been imported, and the Hebrew letters are only used as an
ornament, without constituting a meaningful script...[and] there is...no
agreement even on the language of the inscription...The Byzantine Ioannes
Kinnamos in his Epitome twice mentioned khalisioi in the Hungarian
army...He first describes them as keeping the laws of Moses although not
in a pure form, then as having the same religion as Persians. This is a
reference to the khaliz (Muslims), not Jewish Khazars." Unfortunately she
did not analyze the Chelarevo Jewish gravesite and did not comment on
whether she thinks it is Khazarian or Avar.

The fact is that Judaism was the most important religion in the Khazar
kingdom among the Khazars. New evidence for Khazar Judaism continues to
emerge, as mentioned earlier in this essay, which minimizes the importance
of archaic sources like Ibn Rustah and of a statement against widespread
Judaism in the work of Ibn Fadlan. And new evidence for their migration
westward has also surfaced.

But besides the faulty argument that the Khazars weren't rabbinical
Jews, we have linguistic arguments to counter. For instance, because the
Karaims speak a Turkic language, some say that they must surely be the
real descendants of the Khazars. And any Jews who speak Yiddish surely
must be pure descendants of the Central European Jews. There appears to be
no middle ground among these folks. They simply believe the Khazars aren't
involved in Jewish ancestry at all, and the Karaims (or, alternatively,
Cossacks or Mountain Jews or Krymchaks) are convenient because they need
SOMEONE ELSE to be the Khazar descendants.

The hypothesis that the Karaims are descended from the Khazars has no
merit. The so-called Khazarian recipes and poems among the Crimean Karaims
are 20th century inventions. The alleged gravestone of Rabbi Yitzhak
ha-Sangari (converter of the Khazars to Judaism) in the Karaim cemetery at
Balti Tiimez in Chufut-Kale was a forgery. The sources don't even speak
about a Middle-Eastern rabbi becoming king of the Khazars, yet this hoax
had the engraving of Sangari with the title "bek," meaning "king." In
reality, the Khazar kings always had at least partial Turkic ancestry,
even the dynasty of beks Aaron and Joseph. The Lithuanian and Crimean
Karaims are clearly the descendants of Middle-Eastern Karaites from
Byzantium and Persia. Arguments against their Khazar origin are contained
in my book The Jews of Khazaria on pages 298 and 299. We know now that the
Khazars were Rabbinical Jews, while the Karaite sect vigorously opposes
Rabbinical Judaism. A connection is not supportable between (1)
Middle-Eastern Hebrews who adopted the Turkic language and were native to
Jewish beliefs and (2) Khazars whose native language was Turkic and whom
adopted Judaism later on. The two situations are vastly different, and the
dialect of Turkic that the Karaims spoke is not identical to the Khazarian
language.

"In the twelfth century, the Jews of Russia, who naturally spoke the
language of the country, began to be thrown into contact with the brethren
of Germany, both through mercantile association and by reason of the
influx of western Jews into Slavic countries after the Crusades...These
new-comers, whether by weight of number or because of their superior
training in Judaism, imposed upon the older residents their culture and
their very speech. The German dialect was thus introduced among Polish
Jewry." (Max Leopold Margolis and Alexander Marx, in A History of the
Jewish People (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America,
1947), page 527)

"The label ''Ashkenazi'' does not necessarily mean that all Ashkenazi
Jews came from Germany but that they adopted the cluster of Ashkenazi
culture which included the specific Ashkenazi religious rite and the
German-based Yiddish language. Thus, it is plausible that Slavic-speaking
Jewish communities in Eastern Europe (which existed there from early
times) became dominated in the sixteenth century by Ashkenazi culture and
adopted the Yiddish language." (Benjamin Harshav, in The Meaning of
Yiddish (Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1990), pages 5-6)

"Jews from the Rhineland were invited to Poland...And in Poland these
immigrants now found old settlements of Jews who spoke Slavic, did not
live in ghettos (though in separate sections of cities), and were not
worried or threatened about their Jewishness. These Polish Jews
assimilated their Ashkenazic brethren, newly arrived, and themselves began
to speak - Yiddish." (Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish (New York, NY:
Pocket Books, 1970), page 526)

"Of other Germanic or German-based languages, Yiddish did not take its
final shape as a separate language of eastern, including EC, Europe until
late medieval times. However, its immediate predecessor, Judeo-German
(originating, as recent scholarship has shown, in Bavaria and Bohemia, and
notably in the cities of Regensburg and Prague, and not, as was earlier
thought, in the Rhine valley), spread, at least with the first wave of
Jewish settlers, to Silesia, Poland proper, Lithuania, Belarus', and
western Ukraine during the high and later Middle Ages. Earlier Jewish
ethnic groups had arrived in ECE (or its fringes) from the southeast: the
former Khazaria (and beyond) and Kievan Rus', switching in the new setting
to some form of East Slavic speech, and from the Crimea - the so-called
Karaites - who settled in Lithuania and Galicia and who long retained a
mixture of Turko-Tataric and Hebrew." (Henrik Birnbaum, "The Vernacular
Languages of East Central Europe in the Medieval Period", in "...The Man
of Many Devices, Who Wandered Full Many Ways...: Festschrift in Honor of
János M. Bak", edited by Balázs Nagy and Marcell Sebõk (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 1999), page 385)

"In Poland a sizable population of Jews from the west met a much
smaller group who had arrived via the east. Hundreds of years before,
these eastern Jews had walked from Israel by way of Byzantium. By this
time they spoke some form of Slavic. And because their numbers were much
smaller than the Ashkenazi Jews, they largely disappeared into their
ranks. But they brought one more strand to be woven in." (Miriam
Weinstein, in "Yiddish: A Nation of Words" (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth
Press, 2001), page 25; See also Eckhard Eggers, "Sprachwandel und
Sprachmischung im Jiddischen" (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998) which
discusses the mixing between Slavic Jews and Khazar Jews and Bavarian
Jews)

Are all Jews around the world descended from the Khazars? Certainly
not. But the New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, page 179,[GCP pg 68]
"ASHKENAZI, ASHKENAZIM...constituted before 1963 some nine-tenths of the
Jewish people (about 15,000,000 out of 16,5000,000)[ As of 1968 it is
believed by some Jewish authorities to be closer to 100%]"

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001.

Khazars: (khä´zärz) (KEY) , ancient Turkic people who appeared in
Transcaucasia in the 2d cent. A.D. and subsequently settled in the lower
Volga region. They emerged as a force in the 7th cent. and rose to great
power. The Khazar empire extended (8th-10th cent.) from the northern
shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the Urals and as far
westward as Kiev. The Khazars conquered the Volga Bulgars and the Crimea,
levied tribute from the eastern Slavs, and warred with the Arabs,
Persians, and Armenians. In the 10th cent. they entered into friendly
relations with the Byzantine Empire, which attempted to use them in the
struggle against the Arabs. In the 8th cent. the Khazar nobility embraced
Judaism. Cyril and Methodius subsequently made some Christian converts
among them. Religious tolerance was complete in the Khazar empire, which
reached a relatively high degree of civilization. Itil, its capital in the
Volga delta, was a great commercial center. The Khazar empire fell when
Sviatoslav, duke of Kiev, defeated its army in 965. The Khazars (or
Chazars) are believed by some to have been the ancestors of many East
European Jews.

Russia and The Khazars: Having traced the Knighthood of the Teutonic
Order from its origin to its dissolution as a military-religious
brotherhood, and having noted the development of successor sovereignties
down to the obliteration of Prussia in 1945, we must turn back more than a
thousand years, to examine another thread; a scarlet one, in the tangled
skein of European history.

In the later years of the dimly recorded firt millennium of the
Christian era, Slavic people of several kindred tribes occupied the land
which became known later as the north central portion of European Russia.
South of them between the Don and Volga rivers and north of the lofty
Caucasus Mountains lived a people known to history as Khazars. (Ancient
Russia, by George Vernadsky, Yale University Press, 1943, p. 214) These
people had been driven westward from Central Asia and entered Europe by
the corridor between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea. They found a
land occupied by primitive pastoral people of a score or more of tribes, a
land which lay beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire at its greatest
etent under Trajan (ruled, 98-117 A.D.), and also beyond the boundaries of
the Byzantine Empire (395-1453)

By slow stages the Khazars extended their territory eventually to the
Sea of Azov and the adjacent littoral of the Black Sea. The Khazars were
apparently a people of mixed stock with Mongol and Turkic affinities.
Around the year 600, a Belligerent tribe of half-Mongolian people, similar
to the modern Turks, conquered the territory of what is now Southern
Russia. Before long the kingdom (khanate) of the Khazars, as this tribe
was known, stretched from the Caspian to the Black Se. Its capital, Ityl,
was at the mouth of the Volga River. (A History of the Jews, by Solomon
Grayzel, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947)

In the eighth or ninth century of our era, a khakan (or chagan, roughly
equivalent to tribal chief or primitive king) of the Khazars wanted a
relgion for his pagan people. Partly, perhaps, because of incipient
tension betweenChristians and the adherents of the new Mohammedan faith
(Mohammed died in 632), and partly because of fear of becoming subject to
the power of the Byzantine Emperor or the Islamic Caliph, (Ancient Russia,
by George Vernadsky, Yale University Press, 1943, p. 291) he adopted a
form of the Jewish religion at a date generally placed at c. 741 A.D., but
believed by Fernadsky to be as late as 865.

According to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, (Universal Jewish
Encyclopedia, Vol. VI, pp. 375-377) "This chieftain, Christianity and
Mohammedanism to expound their doctrines before him. This discussion
convinced him that the Jewish faith was the most preferable, and he
decided to embrace it. Thereupon he and about 4,000 Khazars were
circumcised; it was only by degrees that the Jewish teachings gained a
foothold among the population."

In his "History of the Jews," (The Jewish Publication Society of
America, Vol. III, 1894, pp. 140-141) Professor H. Graetz gives further
details: a successor of Bulan, who bore the Hebrew name of Obadiah, was
the first to make serious efforts to further the Jewish religion. He
invited Jewish sages to settle in his ominions, rewarded them royally,
founded synagogues and schools...caused instruction to be given to himself
and his people in the Bible and the Talmud, and introdcued a divine
service modeled on the anccient communities.

After Obadiah came a long series of Jewish chagans, for according to a
fundamental law of the state only Jewish rulers were permitted to ascend
the throne. The significance of the term "ancient communities" cannot be
here explained. For a suggestion of the "incorrect exposition" and the
"tasteless misrepresentations" with which the Bible, i.e., the Old
Testament, was presented through the Talmud, see below in this chapter,
the extensive quotation from Professor Graetz.

Also in the Middle Ages, Vikign warriors, according to Russian
tradition by invitation, pushed from the Baltic area into the low hills
west of Moscow. Archaeological discoveries show that at one time or
another these Northmen penetrted almost all ares south of Lake Ladoga and
West of the Kama and Lower Volga Rivers. Their earliest, and permanent,
settlements were north and east of th eWest Dwina River, in the Vale Llmen
are, and between the Upper Volga and Oka Rivers, at whose junction they
soon held the famous trading post of Nizhni-Novgorod. (Ancient Russia, by
George Vernadsky, Yale University Press, p. 267)

These immigrants from the North and West were princuipally "the ‘Russ,'
a Varangian tribe in ancient annals considered as related to the Swedes,
Angles and Northmen. (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. XIX, pp. 375-377) From
the local Slavic tribes, they organized (c. 862) a state, known
subsequently from their name as Russia, which embraced the territory of
the the Upper Volga and Dnieper Rivers and reached down the latter river
to the Black Sea, (An Introduction to Old Norse, by R.V. Gordon, Oxford
University Press, 1927, map between pp. xxiv-xxv) and to the Crimea. Russ
and Slav were of related stock and their languages, though quite
different, had common Indo-Germanic origin. They accepted Christianity as
their relibion. "Greek Orthodox missionaries, sent to Russ (i.e.,
‘Russia') in the 860'z baptized so many people tht shortly after this a
special bishop was sent to care for their needs. (A History of the
Ukraine, by Michael Hrushevsky, Yale University Press, 1941, p. 65)

The "Rus" (or "Russ") were absorbed into the Slav population which they
organized into statehood. The people of the new state devoted themselves
energetically to consolidating their territory and extending its
boundaries. From the Khazars, who had extended their power up the Dnieper
Valley, they took Kiev, which "was an important trading center even before
becoming, in the 10th century the capital of a large recently
Christianized state." (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. VI, p. 381)
Many Varangians (Rus) had settled among the Slavs in this area (the
Ukraine), and Christian Kiev became the seat of an enlightened
Westward-looking Dynasty, whose members married into several European
royal houses, including that of France.

The Slavs, especially those in the area now known as the Ukraine, were
engaged in almost constant warfare with the Khazars and finally, by 1016
A.D., destroyed the Khazar government and took a large portion of Khazar
territory. For the gradual shrinking of the Khazar territory and the
development of Poland, Lithuania, the Grand Duch of Moscow, and the other
Slavic states. (See the pertinent maps in the Historical Atlas, by William
r. Shepherd, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1911) Some of the
subjugated Khazars remained in the slav-held lands their khakans had long
ruled, and others "migrated to Kiev and other parts of Russia, (Universal
Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. VI, p. 377) probably to a considerable extent
because of the dislocations wrought by the Mongols under Genghis Khan
(11162-1227), who founded in and beyond the old Khazar khanate the
short-lived khanate of the Golden Horde.

The Judaized Khazars underwent further dispersion both northwest into
Lithuania and Polish areas and also within Russia proper and the Ukraine.
In 1240 in Kiev "the Jewish community was uprooted, its surving members
finding refuge in towns further west. (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol.
VI, p. 382) Along with the fleeing Russians, when the capital fell to the
Mongol soldiers of Batu, the nephew of Genghis Khan.

A short time later many of these expelled Jews returned to Kiev.
Migrating thus, as some local power impelled them, the Khazar Jews became
widely distributed in Western Russia. Into the Khazar khanate ther had bee
a few Jewish immigrants; rabbis, traders, refugees, but the people of the
Klevan Russian state did not facilitate the entry of additional Jews into
their territory. The rulers of the Grand Duchy of Moscow also sought to
exclude Jews from areas under its control. "From its earliest times the
policy of the Russian Government was that of complete exclusion of the
Jews from its territories. (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 384)
For instance, "Ivan IV (reign 1533-1584) refused to allow Jewish merchants
to travel in Russia." (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 384)

Relations between Slavs and the Judaized Khazars in their midst were
never happy. The reasons were nto racial; for the Slavs had absorbed many
minorities, but were ideological. The rabbis sent for by Khakan Obadiah
were educated in and were zealots for the Babylonian Talmud, which after
long labors by many hands had been completed on December 2, 1499.

In the thousands of synagogues which were built in the Khazar khanate,
the imported rabbis and their successors were in complete control of the
political, social and religioius thought of their people. So significant
was the Babylonian Talmud as the principal cause of Khazar resistance to
Russian efforts to end their political and religious separatism, and so
significant also are the modern sequels, including those in the United
States, that an extensive quotation on the subject from the "History of
the Jews," by Professor H. Graetz, (History of the Jews, by Professor H.
Graetz, Vol. II, 1893. Pp. 631 ff) is here presented: The Talmud must not
be regarded as an ordinary work, composed of twelve volumes; it possesses
absolutely no similarity to any other literary production, but forms,
without any figure of speech, a works of its own, which must be judged by
its peculiar laws.

The Talmud contains much that is frivolous of which it treats with
great gravity and seriousness; it further reflects the various
superstitious practices and views of its Persian birthplace which presuem
the efficacy of demoniacal medicines, of magic, incantations, miraculous
cures, and interpretations of dreams...It also contains isolated instances
of uncharitable judgments and decrees against members of other nations and
religions, and finally it favors an incorrect exposition of the
scriptures, accepting, as it does, tasteless misrepresentations.

More than six centuries lie petrified in the Talmud...Small wonder
then, that...the sublime and the common, the great and the small, the
grave and the ridiculous, the altar and the ashes, the Jewish and the
heathenish, be discovered side by side.

The Babylonian Talmud is especially distinguished form the Jerusalem or
Palestine Talmud by the flights of thought, the penetration of mind, the
flashes of geius, which rise and vanish again...It was for this reason
that the Babylonian rather than the Jerusalem Talmud became the
fundamental possession of the Jewish race (people, for the Jews are not a
race but a people), its life breath, its very soul...nature and mankind,
powers and events, were for the Jewish nation insignificant,
non-essential, a mere phantom; the only true really was the Talmud.

Not merely educated by the Talmud but actually living the life of its
Babylonian background, which they may have regarded with increased
devotion because most of the Jews of Mesopotamia had embraced Islam, the
rabbi-governed Khazars had no intention whatever of losing their identity
by becoming Russianized or Christian. The intransigent attitude of the
rabbis was increased by their realization that their power would be lost
if their people accepted controls other than the Talmudic. These controls
by rabbis were responsible not only for basic mores, but for such
externals as the peculiarities of dress and hair. It has been frequently
stated by writers on the subject that the "ghetto" was the work, not of
Russians or other Slavs, but rabbis.

As time passed, it came about that these Khazar people of mixed
non-Russian stock, who hated the Russians and lived under Babylonian
Talmudic law, became known in the western world, from their place of
residence and their legal-religious code, as Russian Jews.

Ain Russian lands after the fall of Kiev in 1240, there was a period of
dissension and disunity. The struggle with the Mongols and other Asiatic
khanates continued and from the the Russians learned much about effective
military organization. Also, as the Mongols had not overrun Northern and
Western Rusasia, (Historical Atlas, by William R. Shepherd (Henry Holt and
Company, New York, 1911), Map 77) there was a background for the
resistance and counter-offense which gradually eliminated the invaders.
The capital of reorganized Russia was no longer Kiev, but Moscow (hence
the terms Moscovy and Muscovite). In 1613 the Russian nobles (boyars),
desired a more stable government than they had had, and elected as their
Czar a boy named Michael Romanov, whose veins carried the blood of the
Grand Dukes of Kiev and gthe Grand Dukes of Moscow. Under the Romanovs of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was no change in attitude
toward the Judaized Khazars, who scorned Russian civilization and
stubbornly refused to enter the fold of Christianity. "Peter the Great
(reign 1682-1725) spoke of the Jews as ‘rogues and cheats.'" (Popular
History of the Jews, by H. GrETZ, New York, The Jordan Publishing Co.,
1919, 12935, Vol. VI, by Max Raisin,p. 89) "Elizabeth (reign 1741-1762)
expressed her attitude in the sentence: ‘From the enemies of Christ, I
desire neither gain nor profit." (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. I,
p. 384)

Under the Romanov dynasty (1613-1917) many members of the Russian upper
classes were educated in Germany, and the Russian nobility, already partly
Scandinavian by blood, frequently married Germans or other Western
EuropeNS. Likewise many of the Romanovs, themselves; in fact all of them
who ruled in the later years of dynasty, married into Western families.

Prior to the nineteenth century the two occupants of the Russian throne
best known in world history were Peter I, the Great, and Catherine II, the
Great. The former; who in 1703 gave Russia its "West window," St.
Petersburg, later known as Petrograd and recently as Leningrad, chose as
his consort and successor on the throne as Catherine I (reign 1725-1727),
a captured Marienburg (Germany) servant girl whose mother and father were
respectively a Lithuanian peasant woman and a Swedish Dragoon. Catherine
II, the Great, was a German princess who was proclaimed reigning Empress
of Russia after her husband, the ineffective Caar Peter III, "subnormal in
mind and physique," (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. V, p. 37) left St.
Petersburg. During her thirty-four years as Empress, Catherine, by
studying such works as Blackstone's Commentaries, and by correspondence
with such illustrious persons as Voltaire, F.M. Grimm Frederick the Great,
Dederot, and Maria-Theresa of Austria, kept herself in contact with the
West. (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. XIX, p. 718 and passim) She chose for
her son, weak like his father and later the "madman" Czar Paul I (reign
1796-1801), a German wife.

The nineteenth century Czars were Catherine the Great's grandson,
Alexander I (reign 1801-1825; German wife); his brother, Nicholas I (reign
1825-1855; German wife); his son, Nicholas II (reign 1894-1917; German
wife) who was murdered with his family (1918) after the Jewish Communsits
seized power (1917) in Russia.

Thous many of the Romanovs, including Peter I and Catherine II, had far
from admirable characters; a fact well advertised in Amrican books on the
subject, and though some of them including Nicholas II were not able
rulers, a general purpose of the dynasty was to give theri land certain of
the advantages of Western Europea. In the West they characteristically
sought alliances with one country or another, rathern than ideological
penetration.

Like, their Slavic overlords, the Judaized Khazars of Russia had
various relationships with Germany. Their numers form time to time, as
during the Crusadesk received accretions from the Jewish communities in
Germany; principally into Poland and other areas not yet Russian; many of
the ancestors of these people, however, had previously entered Germany
form Slavic lands.

More interesting than these migrations was the importation from Germany
of an idea conceived by a prominent Jew of solving century-old tension
between native majority population and the Jews in their midst. In
Germany, while Catherine the Great was Empress of Russia, a Jewish scholar
and philsosopher named Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) attracted wide and
favorable attention among non-Jews and a certain following among Jews.

His conception of the barrier between Jew and non-Jew, as analyzed by
Grayszel, (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. V, p. 37) was that the "Jews had
erected about themselves a mental ghetto to balance the physical ghetto
around them." Mendelssohn's objective was to lead the Jews "out of this
mental ghetto into the wide world of general culture; without, however,
doing harm to their specifically Jewish culture," The movement received
the name Haskalah, which may be rendered as "enlightenment." Among other
things, Mendelssohn wished Jews in Germany to learn the German language.

The Jews of Eastern Europe had from early days used corrupted versions
of local vernaculars, written in the Hebrew alphabet (A History of the
Jews, by Solomon grayzel, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1947, p. 456) just as the various vernaculars of Western Euroep
were written in the Latin alphabet, and to further his purpose Mindelssohn
translatted the Pentateuch; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
Deuteronomy, into standard German, using however, the accepted Hebrew
alphabet. (A History of the Jews, by Solomon Grayzel, Philadelphia, The
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947, p. 543) Thus in one stroke he
led his readers a step toward Westernisation by the use of the German
Language and by offering them, instead of the Babylonian Talmud, a portion
of Scripture recognized by both Jew and Christian.

The Mendelssohn views were developed in Russia in the nineteenth
century, notably by Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788-1860), the "Russian
Mendelssohn." Levinsohn was a scholar who, with Abraham Harkavy, deceived
into a field of Jewish history little known in the West, namely the
settlement of Jewish history little known in the West, namely the
settlement of Jews in Russia and their vicissitudes furring the dark
ages... Levinsohn was the first to express the opinion that the Rusasian
Jews hailed not from Germany, as is commonly supposed, but frmo the banks
of the Volga. This hypthesis, corroborated by tradition, Harkavy
established as a fact." (The Haskalah Movement on Russia, by Jacob S.
Raisin, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1913,
1914, p. 17)

The reigns of the nineteenth century Czars showed a fluuuation of
attitudes toward the Jewish "state within a state." (The Haskalah Movement
on Russia, by Jacob S Raisin, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society
of America, 1913, 1914, p. 43) In general, Nicholas I had been less
lenient than Alexander I toward his intractable non-Christian minority,
but he took an immediate interest in the movement endorsed by opportunity
for possibly breaking down the separatism of the Judaized Khazars. He put
in charge of the project of opening hundreds of Jewish schools a brilliant
young Jew, Er. Max Lilenthal.

From its beginning however, the Haskalah movement had had bitter
oppositino among Jews in Germany; many of whom, including the famous Moses
Hess, (Graetz-Raisin, The Haskalah Movement on Russia, by Jacob S. Raisin,
Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1913, 1914, Vol.
VI. Pp. 371) became ardent Jewish nationalists,and in Russia the
opposition was fanatical. "The great mass of Russin Jewry was devoid of
all secular learning, steeped in fanaticism, and given to superstitious
practices (Graetz-Raisin, The Haskalah Movement on Russia, by Jacob S.
Raisin,Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1913,
1914, p. 112) and their leaders, for the most part, had no opinion of
tolerating a project which would lessen or destroy their control.

These leaders believed correctly that the ned education was designed to
lessen the authority of the Talmud which was the cause, as the Russians sa
it, "of the fanaticsm and corrupt morals of the Jews." The leaders of the
Jews also saw that the new schools were a way "to bring the Jews closer to
the Russian people and the Greek Church." (Graetz-Raisin, The Haskalah
Movement on Russia, by Jacob S. Raisin,Philadelphia, The Jewish
Publication Society of America, 1913, 1914, p, 116) According to Raisi,
"the millions of Russian Jews were averse to having the government
interfere with their inner and spiritual life" by "fosting upon them its
educational measures. The soul of Russian Jewry sensed the danger lurking
in the imperial scheme." (The Haskalah Movement on Russia, Vol. VI, p.
117) Lilienthal was in their eyes "a traitor and informer," and in 1845,
to recover a modicum of prestige with his people, he "shook the dust of
bloody Russia from his feet." (Graetz-Raisim, The Haskalah Movement on
Russia, by Jacob S. Raisin, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society
of America, 1913, 1914, Vol. V, p. 117) Thus the Haskalah movement failed
in Russia to break down the separatism of the Judaized Khazars.

When Nicholas I died, his son Alexander Ii (reign 1855-1881) decided to
try a new way of winning the Khazar minority to willing citizenship in
Russia. He granted his people, including the Khazars, so many liberties
that he was called the "Czar Liberator."

By irony, or nemesis, his "liberal regime" contributed substantially to
the downfall of Christian Russia. Despite the ill-success of his Uncle
Alexander's "measures to effect the ‘betterment' of the ‘obnoxious' Jewish
element, (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 384) he ordered a
wholesale relaxation of oppressive and restraining regulations
(Graetz-Raisin, The Haskalah Movement on Russia, by Jacob S. Raisin,
Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1913, 1914, Vol.
VI, p. 124) and the Jews were free to attend all schools and universities
and to travel without restrictions. The new freedom led, however, to
results the "Liberator" had not anticipated.

Educated, and free at last to organize nationally, the Judaized Khazars
in Russia became not merely an indigestible mass in the body polite, the
characteristic "state within a state," but a formidable anti-government
force. With non-Jews of nihilistic or other radical tendencies; the
so-called Russian "intelligentsia" they sought in the first instance to
further their aims by assassinations. (Modern Europen History, by Charles
Downer Hazen, Holt, New York, p. 565) Alexander tried to abate the
hostility of the "terrorists" by granting more and more concessions, but
on the day the last concessions were announced "a bomb was thrown at his
carriage. The carriage was wrecked, and many of his escorts were injured.
Alexander escaped as by a miracle, but a second bomb exploded near him as
he was going to aid the injured. He was horribly mangled, and died within
an hour. Thus perished the Czar Liberator. (Modern European History, p.
567)

Some of those involved in earlier attempts to assassinate Alexander II
were of Jewish Khazar background. (See The Anarchists, by Ernest Alfred
Vizetelly, John Lane, London and New York 1911, p. 66) According to the
Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, the "assassination of Alexander II in which
a Jewess had played a part" revived a latent "anti-Semitism." Resentful of
precautions taken by the murdered Czar's son and successor, Alexander III,
and also possessing a new world plan, hordes of Jews, some of them highly
educated in Russian universities, migrated to other Europen countries and
to America. The emigration continued under Nicholas II. Many Jews remained
in Russia, however,for "in 1913 the Jewish population of Russia amounted
to 6,946,000. (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. IX, p. 285)

Various elements of this rstless aggressive minority nhurtured the
amazing quadruple aims of internatioal Communism, the seizure of power in
Russia, Zionism, and continued migration to America, with a fixed purpose
to retain their nationalistic separatism. In many instances, the same
individuals were participants i two or more phases of the four-fold
objective.

Among the Jews who remained in Russia, which then included Lithrania,
the Ukraine, (A History of the Ukraine, Michael Hrushevsky, Yale
University Press, 1941) and much of Poland, were the founders of the
Russian Bolshevik party. In 1897 was founded the bond, the union of Jewish
workers in Poland and Lithuania...They engaged in revolutionary activity
upon a large scale, and their energy made them the spearhead of the Party.
(Article on "Communism" by Harold J. Laski, encyclopedia Britannica, Vol.
III, pp. 824-827)

The name Bolsheviki means majority (from Russian Bolshe, the larger)
and commemorates the fact that at the Brussels-London conference of the
party in late 1902 and early 1903, the violent Marxist program of Lenin
was adopted by a 25 to 23 vote, the less violent minority or "Mensheviki"
Marxists fading finally from the picture after Stalin's triumph in
October, 1917. It has been also stated that the term Bolshevik refers to
the "larger" or more violent program of the majority faction. After (1918)
the Bolsheviki called their organization the Communist Party.

The Zionist Jews were another group that laid its plan in Russia as a
part of the new re-orientation of Russian Jewry after the collapse of
Haskalah and the assassination (1881) of Alexander II. "On November 6,
1884, for the first time in history, a Jewish international assembly was
held at Kattowitz, near the Russian fountier, where representatives from
all classes and different countries met and decided to colonize
Palestine..." (The Haskalah Movement in Russia, p. 285)

For a suggestion of the solidarity of purpose between the Jewish Bund,
which was the core of the Communist Party,and early Zionism.
(Graetz-Raisin, The Haskalah Movement on Russia, by Jacob S. Raisin, p.
662) Henceforth a heightened sense of race-consciousness takes the place
formerly held by religion and is soon to develop into a concrete
nationalism with Zion as its goal." (Graez-Raisin, The Haskalah Movement
on Russia, by Jacob S. Raisin, p. 168)

In Russia and abroad in the late nineteenth century, not only Bundists
but other Khazar Jews had been attracted to the writings of Karl Marx
(1818-1883), party, it seems, because he was Jewish in origin. "On both
paternal and material sides Karl Marx was descended from rabbinical
families. (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. VII, p. 289)

The Marxian program of drastic controls, so repugnant to the free
western mind, was no obstacle to the acceptance of Marxism by many Khazar
Jews, for the Babylonian Talmud under which they lived had taught them to
accept authoritarian dictation on everything from their immorality to
their trade practices. Since the Talmud contaijned more than 12,000
controls, the regimentation of Marxism was acceptable; provided the Khazar
populitician, like the Talmudic rabbi, exercised the power of the
dictatorship.

Under Nicholas II, there was no abatement of the regulations designed,
after the murder of alexander II. To curb the anti-government activities
of Jews; consequently, the "reaction to those excesses was Jewish support
of the Bolsheviks...(Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. VII, p. 286) The
way to such support was easy since the predecessor organization of Russian
Comunism was the Jewish "Bund."

Thus Marxian Communism, modified for expediency, became an instrument
for the violent seizure of power. The Communist Jews, together with
revolutioaries of Russian stock, were sufficiently numerous to give the
venture a promise of success, if attempted at the right time. After the
rout of the less violent fraction in 1917, when Russia was staggering
under defeat by Germany/ a year before Germany in turn staggered to defeat
under the triple blows of Britain, France, and the Untied States. "The
great hour of freedom struck on the 15th of March, 1917," when ‘Czar
Nicholas's train was stopped" and he was told "that his rule was at an
end...Israel, in Russia, suddenly found itself lifted out of its
oppression and degradation." (Graetz-Rasin, The Haskalah Movement on
Russia, p. 209)

At this moment Lenin appeared on the scene, after an absence of nine
years. (Encyclopedia Brit., Vol. XIII, p. 912) The Germans, not realizing
that he would be anything more than a trouble maker for their World War I
enemy, Russia, passed him and his party (exact nuber disputed; about 200?)

In a sealed train from Switzerland to the Russian border. In Lenin's
sealed train, "Out of a list of 165 names published, 23 are Russian, 3
Georgian, 4 Armenian, 1 German, and 128 Jewish. (The Surrender of an
Empire, Nesta H. Webster, Boswell Printing and Publishing Company, Ltd.,
10 Essex St., London, W.C2, 1931, p. 77) "At about the same time, Trotsky
arrived from the United States, followed by over 300 Jews from the East
End of New York and joined up with the Bolshevik Party." (The Surrender of
an Empire, p. 73)

Thus under Lenin, whose birth-range was Ulianov and whose racial
antecedents are certainly Jewish, and under Leon Trotsky, a Jew, whose
birth name was Bronstein, a small number of highly trained Jews from
abroad, along with Russian Judaized Khazan and non-Jewish captives to the
Marxian ideology, were able to make themselves masters of Russia.
"Individual revolutinary leaders and Sverdlov; played a conspicuous part
inthe revolution of November, 1917, which enabled the Bslshevists totake
possession of the state apparatus. (Universale Jewish Encyclopedia Vol.
IX, p. 668)

Here and there in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia other Jews w are
named as co-founders of russian Communism, but not Lenin an dStalin. Both
of these, however, are said by some writers to be half-Jewish. Whatever
the racial antecedents of their top man, the first Soviet commissariats
werelargely staffed with Jews. The Jewish position in the Communist
movement was well udnerstood in Russia. "The White Armies which opposed
the Bolsishvik government linked Jews and Bolsheviks as common enemies."
(Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 336)

Those interested in the ratio of Jews to others in the government in
the early days of Communist rule in Russia should, if possible, see Les
derniers jours des Romanof, (The Last Days of the Romanovs, by Robert
Wilton) long the Russian correspondent of the London Times. A summary of
its vital passages is included in the "foreword to Third Edition" of "The
Mystical Body o fChrist in the Modern World, by Rev. Denis Fahey, a
well-known Irish professor of philsophy and Church history. Professor
Fahey gives names and natioality of the members of the Council of Peoples
Commissars, the Central Executive Committee, and the Extraordinary
Commission, and in summary quotes from Wilton as follows: According to the
data furnished by the Soviet Press, out of 556 important functionaries of
the Bolshevik State...there were in 1918-1919, 17 Russian, 2 Ukrainians,
11 Armenians, 35 Letts, 15 Germans, 1 Hungarian, 10 Georgians, 3 Poles, 3
Finns, 1 Karaim, 457 Jews.

As the decades passed by; after the fateful year 1917, Judaized Khazars
kept a firm hand on the helm of the government in the occupied land of
russia. In due time they built a bureaucracy to their hearts' desire. The
government; controlled Communist press "issued numerous and violent
denunciations of anti-Semitic episodes, either violence or
discriminations.

Also, "in 1935 a court ruled that anti-Semitism in Russia was a penal
offense. (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 386) Among top-flight
leaders prominent in the middle of the twentieth century. Stalin,
Kaganovich, Beria, Molotov, and Litvinoff all have Jewish blood, or are
married to Jewesses. The latter circumstance should not be overlooked,
because from Nero's Poppaea (Encyclopedia, Italiana, Vol. XXVII, p. 932;
also, The Works of Flavius Josephus, translated by William Whiston, David
McKay, Philadelphia, pp. 8, 612, 616) to the Montreal chemist's women
friend in the Canadian atomic espionage trials (Report of the Royal
Commission, Government Printing Office, Ottawa, Canada, 1946) The
influence of a certain type of wife; or other closely associated woman,
has been of utmost significance.

Nero and Poppaea may be allowed to sleep; if their crimes permit, but
Section III, 11, entitled "Raymond Boyer, Montreal," in the Report of the
anadian Royal Commission should be read in full by all who want facts
onthe subject of the corruption of scientists, and others working on
government projects. In the Soviet embassy records, turned over to
Canadian authorities by Ivor Gouzinko, was Col. Zabotin's notebook which
contained the following entries; (Report of the Royal Commissin,
Government Printing Office, Canada, 1946, pp. 375 and 397 respectively)
Professor Frenchman, a noted chemist, about 40 years of age. Works in
McGill Univerity, Montreal. Was the best of the specialists on VV on the
American Continent. Gives full information on explosives and chemical
plants. Very rich. He is afraid to work. (Gave the formula of RDX, up to
the present there was no evaluation from the boss)

Contact; I. Freda: Jewess; works as a co-worker in the International
Bureau of Labour. A lady friend of the Professor. In view of the facts
frunished abocve as to the racial composition of the early Communist
bureaucracy, it is perhaps not surprising that a large proton of the
important foreign efforts of the rpesent government of Russia are
entrusted to Jews.

This is especially notable in th elist of current or recent exercises
of Soviet power in the satellite lands of Eastern Europe. Anna Rabinsohn
Pauker, Dictator of Rumania; Matyas Rakosi, Director of Hungary; Jacob
Berman, Dictator of Poland; D.M. Manuilsky, Director of the Ukraine; and
many other persons highly placed in the governments of the several Eastern
European countries are all said to be members of this new Royal Race of
Russia.

Of Eastern European origin are the leaders of late nineteenth centruy
and twentieth century political Zionism which flowered from the already
recorded beginnins at Kattowitz in 1884. Born at budapest, Hungary, was
Thodor Herzl (1860-1904), author (1896) of Der Judenstatt (The Jews'
State), who presided over the "Zionist Congress," which "took place at
Basel, Switzerland, on August 29-31, 1897. (Universal Jewish Encyclopedia,
Vol. II, p. 102)

Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the had of political Zionism at that time of its
recourse to violence, was born in Plonsk, Poland. Since these top leaders
are Eastern Europeans, it is not surprising that most of the recetn
immigrants into Palestine are of Soviet and satellite origin and that
their weapons have been largely from the soviet Union and from
Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia.

As a number of writers have pointed out, political Zionism entered its
violent phase after the discovery of the incredibly vast mineral wealth of
Paalestine. According to "Zionists Misleading World With Untruths for
Palestine Conquest," a full-page article nserted as an advertisement in
the New York Herald Tribune (January 14, 1947), "an independent Jewish
state in Palestine was the only certain method by which Zinoists could
acquire complete control and outright ownership fo the proven Five
Trillion Dollar ($5,ooo,ooo,ooo,ooo) chemical and mineral wealth of the
Dead Sea."

The long documented article is signed by R.M. Schoendorf,
"Representative of Cooperating Americans of the Christian Faith;" by Habib
I. Katibah, "Representative of Cooperating Americans of Arab Ancestry;"
and by Benjamin H. Freedman, "Representative of Cooperating Americans of
the Jewish Faith," and is convincing. Irrespective, however, of the value
of the Dead Sea minerals, the oil flow of the dominance of the motive of
self-aggrandizement in political Zionism has been affirmed and denied; but
it is difficult for an observer to see any possible objective apart from
mineal wealth or long range grand strategy, including aggression, in a
proposal to make a nation out of an agriculturally poor, already
overpopulated territory the size of Vermont.

The intention of aggression at the expense of Moslem peoples,
particularly in the direction of Iraq and Iran, is suggested also by the
fact that the Eastern European Jews, adherents to the Babylonian Talmud,
had long turned their thoughts to the lands where their sages lived and
where most of the native-Jewish population had embraced the Moslem faith.
Any possible Zionist religious motive such as the hope of heaven, which
fired the zeal of the Crusaders, is apparently ruled out by the nature of
Judaism, as it is generally understood. "The Jewish religion is a way of
life and has no journulated creed, or articles of faith,t he acceptance of
which brings redemption or salvation to the believer..." (Opening words,
p. 763, of the section on "doctrines," in Religious Bodies: 1936, Vol. II,
Part I, Denominations A to J, U.S. Department of Commerce, Jesse H. Jones,
Secretary, Bureau of Census, Superintendent of documents, Government
Printing Office, Washington, D.C.)

The secret or underground overseas efforts of Khazar-dominated russia
apparently been intrusted principally to Jews. This is especially true of
atomic espionage. The Report of the Royal Commission of Canada, already
referred to, shows that Sam Carr (Cohen), organizer for all Canada; Fred
Rose (Rosenberg), organizer for French Canada, and member of the Canadian
Parliament from a Montreal constituency; and Germina (or Hermina)
Rabinowich, in charge of liaison with U.S. Communists, were all born in
Russia or satellite lands.

In this connection, it is important to stress the fact that the
possession of a Western name does not necessarily imply Western European
stock. In fact, the maneuver of name-changing frequently disguises an
individual's stock or origin. Thus the birth-name of John Gates; editor of
the Communist Daily Worker was Israel Regenstreif. Other name changers
among the eleven Communists found guilty by a New York jury in October,
1949, included Gil Green, born Greenberg; Gus Hall, born Halberg; and Carl
Winter, born Weissberg. (For details on these men and the others, see the
article, "The Trial of the Eleven Communists," by Sidney Shalett, Reader's
Digest, August, 1950, pp. 59-72)

Other examples of name-changing can be cited among political writers,
army officers, and prominent officials in the executive agencies and
departments in Washington. Parenthetically, the maneuver of acquiring a
name easily acceptable to the majority was very widely practiced by the
aliens prominent in the seizure of Russia for Communism, among the
name-changers being Lenin (Ulianov), Trotsky (Bronstein), and
Stalin(Dzygasgvuku), the principle founders of State Communism.

The United States Government refused Canada's invitation in 1946 to
cooperate in Canada's invesitbagion of atomic spies, but in 1950 when
(despite "red herring" talk of the Chief Executive) our atomic spy
suspects began to be apprehended, the first was Harry Gold, then Abraham
Brothmn, and Miriam Moskowitz. Others were M. Sobell, David Greenglass,
Julius Fosenberg, and Mr. Ethel Rosenberg (not to be confused with Mrs.
Anna Rosenberg). Various sentences were given. The Rosenbergs received the
death penalty. (See Atom Treason, by Frank Britton)

As of early May, 1952, however, the sentence had not been carried out
and a significant portion of the Jewish press was campaigning to save the
Rosenbergs. Referring to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Samuel B. Gach,
Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the California Jewish Voice ("Largest
Jewish Circulation in the West") wrote as follwos in his issue of April
25, 1952: "We deplore the sentence against tht two Jews and despise the
cowardly Jewish judge who passed same..."

In March, 1951, Dr. William Perl of the Columbia University _hysics
Department was arrested "on four counts of perjury in connection with the
crumbling Soviet atomic spy ring ...Perl whose father was born in
Russia...had his name changed from Utterperl (Mutterperl?) To perl" in
1945. (Washington Times-Herald, March 15, 1951)

For further details on these persons and others, see "Atomic Traitors,"
by Congressmen Fred Busbey of Illinois in the June, 1951, Number of
National Republic.

Finally, the true head of Communism in America was found not to be the
publicly announced head, but the Jew, Gerhardt Eisler, who, upon detection
"escaped" from America on the Polish S.S. "Batory," to a high position in
the Soviet Government of East Germany. (Communist Activities Amon Aliens
and National Groups, part III, Government printing Office, Washington,
D.C., p. 236)

Very pertinent to the subject under consideration is a statement
entitled "Displaced Persons: Facts vs. Fiction," made in the Senate of the
United States on January 6, 1950, by Senator Pat McCarran, Democrat of
Nevada, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Senator McCarran said in
part: "Let it be remembered that the Attorney General of the United States
recently testified that an analysis of 4,984 of the more militant members
of the Communist Party in the United States showed that 91.4 percent of
the total were of foreign stock or were married to persons of foreign
stock."

With more than nine-tenths of our "more militant" Communists thus
recruited from or allied to "foreign stock" and with that "stoc: totaling
perhaps not more than 10,000,000 or one-fifteenth of our nation's
population, a little recourse to mathematics will suggest that the
employment of an Eastern European or other person of recent alien
extraction or connection is one hudnred and fifty times more likely to
yield a traitor than is the employment of a person of native stock!"

An "authoritative" Jewish point of view toward Soviet Russia is
explained in the Unviersal Jewish Encyclopedia in the concluding
paragraphs on Karl Marx. According to this source, Jews "recognize the
experience of the Soviet Union, borne of 6,000,000 Jews, as testimony of
the Marxist position on the question of national and racial equality." The
Encyclopedia comments further on the "striking fact that the one country
which professes official allegiance to Marxian teachings is the one where
anti-Semitism has been outlawed and its resurgence rendered impossible by
the removal of social and economic inequalities." (Universal Jewish
Encyclopedia, Vol. VIII, p. 390)

In "The Jewish People Face the Post-War World," by Alexander Bittelman
(Morning Freiheit Association, 1945, p. 19) the affection of a
considerable body of American Jews for the Soviet Union is considerable
body of American Jews for the Soviet Union is expressed dramatically: If
not for the Red Army, there would be no Jews in Europe today, nor in
Palestine, nor in Africa; and in the United States, the length of our
existence would be counted in days...The Soviet Union Has Saved The Jewish
People.

Therefore, let the American Jewish masses never forge our historic debt
to the Saviour of the Jewish people; the Soviet Union. Be it noted,
however, that Mr. Bittelman admits indirectly that he is not speaking for
all American Jews, partifularly when he assails as "reactionary" the
"non-democratice forced in Jewish life...hsuch as the Sulzbergers,
Rosenwalds, and Lazsrons." ( Morning Freiheit Association, p. 9) In
addition to ideology, another factor in the devotion to their old
homelands of so many of the newer American Jews of Eastern European source
is kinship. According to The American Zionist Handbook, 68 to 70% of
United States Jews have relations in Poland and the Soviet Union.

Quite in harmony with the Bittleman attitude toward the Soviet was the
finding of the Canadian Royal Commission that Soviet Russia exploits fully
the predilection of Jews toward Communism: "It is significant that a
number of documents from the Russian Embassy specifically note ‘Jew' or
‘Jewess' in entries on their relevant Canadian agents or prospective
agents, showing that the Russian Fifth Column leaders attached particular
significance to this matter." (The Report of the Royal Commission, p. 82)

In view of the above-quoted statement of a writer for the great New
York publication,the Universal Jewish encyclopedia, which is described on
its title page as "authorative," and in view of the findings of the
Canadian Royal Commissin, not to mentino other facts and testimonies, it
would seem that no one should be surprised that certain United States Jews
of Eastern European origin or influence have transmitted atomic or other
secrets to the Soviet Union.

Those who are caught, of course, must suffer the fate of spies, as
would happen to American espionage agents abroad; but, in the opinion of
the author, the really guilty parties in the Untied States are those
Americans of native stock who, for their own evil purposes, placed the
pro-Soviet individuals in positions where thy could steal or connive at
the stealing of American secrrets of atomic warfare. This guilt, whikch in
view of the terrible likely results of atomic espionage is really
blood-guilt, cannot be sidestepped and should not be overlooked by the
American people.

The presence of so many high-placed spies in the United States prompts
a brief reference to our national habit (a more accurate term than policy)
in regard to immigration. In December, 2, 1832, President Monroe
proclaimed, in the famous Doctrine which bears his nae, that the American
government would not allow continental European powers to "extend their
system" in the Untied States.

At that time and until the last two decades of the nineteenth century,
immigration brought us almost exclusively European people whose ideals
were those of Wesbern Christian civilization; these people became helpers
in subduing and settlign our vast frontier area; they wished to conform to
rather than modify or supplant the body of traditions and ideals summed up
in the word "America."

After 1880, however, our immigration shifted sharply to include
millions of persons from Southern and Eastern Europe. Almost all of these
people were lesssympathetic than predecessor immigrants to the government
and the ideals of the Untied States and a very large portion of them were
non-Christians who had no intention whatever of accepting the ideals of
Western Christian civilization, but had purposes of their own. These
purposes were accomplished not by direct military invasion, as President
Monroe feared, but covertly by infiltration, propaganda, and electoral and
financial pressure. The average American remained unaware and uperturbed.

Among those who early foresaw the problems to be created by opur new
immigrants was General Eisenhower's immediate predecessor as President of
Columbia University. In a small but extremely valuable book, "The American
As He Is," President Nicholas Murray Butler in 1908 called attention to
"the fact that Christianity in some one of its many forms is a dminant
part of the American nature." Butler, then at the zenity of his
intellectual power, expressed fear that our "capacity to subdue and
assimilate the alien elements brought...by immigration may soon be
exhauste." He concluded accorrdingly that "The dangers which confront
America will come, if at all, from within."

Statistices afford ample reasons for President Butler's fears. "The new
immigration was comprised preponderantly of three elements: the Italians,
the Slavs, and the Jews. (The Reoport of the Royal Commission, p. 82) The
Italians and the Slavs were less assimilable than immigrants from Northern
and Western Europe, and tended to congregate instead of distributing
themselves over the hole country as the earlier Northern European
immigrants had usually done.

The assimilatino of Italians and Slavs was helped, however, by their
belonging to the same parent Indo-Germanic racial stock as the
English-German-Irish majority, and above all by their being Christians;
mostly Roman Catholics, and therefore finding numerous co-religionists not
only among fully Americanized secnod and third generation Irish Catholics
but among old stock Anglo-American Catholcis descending from Colonial
days. Quite a few persons of Italian and Slavic stock were or became
Protestants, chiefly Baptist; among them being ex-Governor Charles poletti
of New York and ex-Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota. The new Italian
and Slavic immigrants and their children soon began to marry among the old
stock. In a protracted reading of an Italian language American newspaper,
the author noted that approximately half of all recorded marriages of
Italians were to person with non-Italian names.

Thus in one wya or another the new Italian and slavic immigrants began
to merge into the general American pattern. This happened to some extent
everywhere and was notable in areas where the newcomers were not
congregated; as in certain urban and mining areas, but were dispersed
among people of native stock. With eventual compelte asimilation by no
means impossible, there was no need of a national conference of Americans
and Italians or of Americans and Slavs to further the interests of those
minorities.

With the new Jewish immigrants, however,the developments were
strikingly different; and quite in line with the fears of rsident Butler.
The handful of Jews, mostly Sephardic (Webster's New International
Dictionary, 1934, p. 2281) and German, already in this country (about
280,000 in 1877), were not numerous enough to contribute cultural guidance
to the newcomers. (See Graetz-Raisin, Vol. VI,Chapter IV, an "American
Continent," A "the Sephardic and German Periods," "B" "The Russian
Period.") These newcomers arrived in vast hordes; especially from
territory under the sovereignty of Russia, the total number of legally
recorded immigrants from that country between 1881 and 1920 being
3,237,079, (The Immigration and Naturalization Systems of the United
States, p. 817) most of them Jews. Many of those Jews are now referred to
as Polish Jews because they came from that portion of Russia which had
been the kingdom of Poland prior to the "partitions" of 1772-1795 (Modern
History, by Carl I. Becker, Silver Burdett Company, New York, p. 138) and
was the Republic of Poland between World War I and World War II.
Accordingly New York City's 2,500,00 or more Jews.

Thus by sheer weight of numbers, as well as by aggressiveness the
newcomer Jews from Eastern Europe pushed intot he background the more or
less Westernized Jews, who had migrated or whose ancestorshad migrated to
America prior to 1880 and had become for the most part popular and
successful merchants with no inordinate interest in politics. In striking
contrast, the Eastern European Jew made himself "a power to be reckoned
with in the professions, the industries, and the political parties.
(Graetz-Raisin, Vol. VI, p. 344)

The overwhelming of the older Americanized Jews is well portrayed in
"The Jewish Dilemma," by Elmer Berger. (The Devin Adair Company, New York,
1945) Of the early American Jews, Berger writes: "Most of thee first
200,000 came from Germany.

They integrated themselves completely. (The Devin Adair Company, New
York, 1945, p. 232 ) This integration was not difficult; for many persons
of the Jewish religion Western Europe in the nineteenth century not only
had no racial or ethnic conneciton with the Khazars, but were not
separatists or Jewish nationalists. The old contentions of their ancestors
with their Christian neighbors in Western Europe nad been largely
overlooked on both sides by the beginning of the nineteenth century,a nd
nothing stood in the way of their full integration into national life. The
American kinsmen of these Westernised Jews were similar in outlook.

Since the predominant new Jews consider themselves a superior people,
(Race and Nationality as Factors in American Life, by Henry Pratt
Fairchild, The Ronald Press Company, New York, 1947, p. 140) and a
separate nationality, assimilation appears now to be out of the question.
America now has virtually a nation within the nation, and an aggressive
culture-conscious nation at that.

The stream of Eastern Europeans was diminshed in volume during World
War I, but was at flood level again in 1920. (Race and Nationality as
Factors in American Live, p. 140) At last the Congress became sufficiently
alarmed to initiate action. The House Committeed on immigration, in its
report on the bill that later became the quota law of 1921, reported:
There is a limit to our power of assimilation...the processes of
assimilation and amalgamation are slow and difficult.

With the population of the broken parts of Europe headed this way in
every-increasing numbers, why not pre-emptorily check the stream with this
temporary measure, and in the meantime try the unique and novel experiment
of enforcing all of the immigration laws on our statutes? Accordingly, the
67th Congress "passed the first quota law, which was approved on May 19,
1921, limiting the number of any nationality entering the United States to
3 percent of the foreign-born of that nationality who lived here in 1910.
Under the law, approximately 350,000 aliens were permitted to enter each
year, mostly from Northern and Western Europe. (The Immigration and
Naturlization Systems of the United States, p. 56)

The worry of the Congress over unassimilated aliens continued and the
House Congress over unassimilable aliens continued and the House Committee
on Immigration and Naturalizat ion of the 68th Congress reported that it
was "necessary to the sucessful future of our nation to preseve the basic
strain of our population" and continued (The Immigration and
Naturalization Systems of the United States, p. 60) as follows: Since it
is the axiom of political science that a government not imposed by
external force is the visible expression of the ideals, standards, and
social viewpoint of the people over which it rules, it is obvious that a
change in the character or composition of the population must inevitably
result in the evolution of a form of government consonant with the base
upon which it rests. If, therefore, the principle of individual liberty,
guarded by a constitutional government created on this continent nearly a
century and a half ago, is to endure, the basic strain of our population
must be maintained and our economic standards preserved.

The American people do not concede the right of any foreign group in
the United States, or government abroad, to demand a participation in our
possessing, tangible or intangible, or to dicate the character of our
legislation.

The new law "changed the quota basis form 1910 to 1890, reduced the
quotas from 3 to 2 percent, provided for the establishment of permanent
quotas on the basis of national origin, and placed the burden of proof on
the alien with regard to his admissibility and the legality of his
residence inthe Uniited Stated." It was passed by the Congress on May
15,and signed by President Calvin Coolidge on May 26, 1924. The new quota
system was still more favorable relatively to the British Isles and
Germany and other countries of Northern and Western Europe and ecluded
"persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of
the government of the United States." Unfortunately, within ten years,
this salutary law was to be largely nullified misinterpretation of its
intent and by continued scandalous maladministration, a principle worry of
the Congress (as shown above) in 1921 and continuously since. (The
Immigration and Naturalization Systems of the United States, p. 60)

By birth and by immigration either clandestine or in violation of the
intent of the "national origins" law of 1924, the Jewish population of the
U.S. increased rapidly. The following official Census Bureau statement is
of interest: "In 1887 there were at least 277 congregations in the country
and 230,000 Jews; in 1890, 533 congregations and probably 475,000 Jews; in
1906, 1700 congregations and about 1,775,000 Jews; in 1916, 1900
congregations and about 3,300,000 Jews; in 1936, 3,118 permanent
congregations and 4,641,184 Jews residing in the cities, towns and
villages in which the congregations were located." (Religious Bodies, p.
763)

On other religions, the latest government statistics are mostly for the
year 1947, but for Jews the 1936 figure remains. (The Immigration and
Naturalization Systems of the United States, p. 849) As to the total
number of Jews in the Untied States the government has no exact figures,
any precise figures beyond a vague "over five million" being impossible
because of incomplete records and illegal immigration. The Committee on
the Judiciary of the Senate, (The Immigration and Naturalization Systems
of the United States, p. u8423) however, accepts the World Almanac figure
of 15,713,638 Jews of religious affiliation in the world and summarizes
thus: "statistics indicate that over 50 of 15,713,638 Jews of religious
affiliation in the world and summarizes thus: "statistics indicate that
over 50 percent of the World Jewish population is now residing in the
Western Hemisphere, (The Immigration and Naturalization Systems of the
United States, p. 21) i.e., at least 8,000,000.

Since some three-fourths of a million Jews live in other North and
South American countries besides the United States may be placed at a
minimum of about 7,250,000. Jews unaffiliated with organizations whose
members are counted, illegal entrants, etc., may place the total number in
the neighborhood of 10,000,000. This likely figure would justify the
frequently heard statement that more than half the Jews of the world are
in the United States. Perentage-wise this is the government summary (The
Immigration and Naturalization Systems of the United States, p. 241) of
Jewish population in the United States.

In 1937, Jews constituted less than 4 percent of the American people,
but during the 7-year period following (1937-43), net Jewish immigration
to the United States ranged between 25 and 77 percent of total net
immigration to this country. For the 36-year period, 1908-43, net Jewish
immigration constituted 14 percent of the total. The population of the
Jewish population has increased twenty-one-fold during the same period.

The above governenment figures require elucidation. The figures include
only those Jews connected with an organized Jewish congregation and, as a
corollary, exclude the vast number of Jeww, illegal entrants and others,
who are not so connected, and hence not officially listed as Jews.

The stated increase of Jews by 2100 percent since 1877 is thus far too
small because non-Congregational Jews are not counted. Moreover, since the
increase of 300 percent in the total population incljudes known Jews, who
increased at the rate of 2100 percent,t he increase in population of
non-Jews is far less than the 300 percent increase of the total
population. This powerful and rapidly growing minority; closely knit and
obsessed with its own objectives which are not those of Western Christian
civilization, will be discussed along with other principal occupants of
the stage of ublic affairs in America during the early 1950s. Details will
come as a surprise to many, who are the unwitting victims of censorship.
Valuable for its light on the global projects of politial Zionism, with
especial reference to Africa, is Douglas Reed's "Somewhere South of Suez."
(Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1951)

After mentioning that the "secret ban" against publishing the truth on
"Zionist Nationalism," which he holds "to be allied in its roots to Soviet
Communism," has grown in his adult lifetime "from nothing into something
approaching a law of lese majesty at some absolute court of the dark
past," Mr. Reed states fuirther that "the Zionist Nationalists are
powerful enough to govern governments in the great countries of the
remaining West!" He concludes further that "Amerian Presidents and British
Prime Miisters, and all their colleagues," bow to Zionism as if venerating
a shrine.

The History of The Jewish Khazars: "...Our first question here is, When
did the Khazars and the Khazar name appear? There has been considerable
discussion as to the relation of the Khazars to the Huns on the one hand
and to the West Turks on the other. The prevalent opinion has for some
time been that the Khazars emerged from the West Turkish empire. Early
references to the Khazars appear about the time when the West Turks cease
to be mentioned. Thus they are reported to have joined forces with the
Greek Emperor Heraclius against the Persians in A.D. 627 and to have
materially assisted him in the siege of Tiflis. it is a question whether
the Khazars were at this time under West Turk supremacy. The chronicler
Theophanes {died circa A.D. 818} who tells the story introduces them as
'the Turks from the east whom they call Khazars.'... A similar discussion
on the merits of the different races is reported from the days before
Muhammad, in which the speakers are the Arab Nu'man ibn-al-Mudhir of
al-Hirah and Khusraw Anushirwan. The Persian gives his opinion that the
Greeks, Indians, and Chinese are superior to the Arabs and so also, in
spite of their low material standards of life, the Turks and the Khazars,
who at least possess an organization under their kings. Here again the
Khazars are juxtaposed with the great nations of the east. It is consonant
with this that tales were told of how ambassadors from the Chinese, the
Turks, and the Khazars were constantly at Khusraw's gate, (Tabari, i, 899.
According to ibn-Khurdadhbih, persons wishing access to the Persian court
from the country of the Khazars and the Alans were detained at Bab
al-Abwab (B.G.A. vi, 135)) and even that he kept three thrones of gold in
his palace, which were never removed and on which none sat, reserved for
the kings of Byzantium, China and the Khazars. In general, the material in
the Arabic and Persian writers with regard to the Khazars in early times
falls roughly into three groups, centering respectively round the names of
(a) one or other of the Hebrew patriarchs, (b) Alexander the Great, and
(c) certain of the Sassanid kings, especially, Anushirwan and his
immediate successors. A typical story of the first group is given by
Ya'qubi in his History. After the confusion of tongues at Babel (Genesis
10:18; 11:19); the descendants of Noah came to Peleg (Genesis 10:25;
11:16-19; 1 Chronicles 1:19; 1:25), son of Eber (Genesis 10:21; 10:24-25;
11:14-17; Numbers 24:24; 1 Chronicles 1:18-19; 1:25; 8:12; Nehemiah
12:20), and asked him to divide (Genesis 10:5; 10:25; 10:32; Exodus 14:21;
Deuteronomy 4:19; 32:8; 1 Chronicles 1:19) the earth among them. He
apportioned to the descendants of Japheth (Genesis 5:32; 6:10; 7:13; 9:18;
9:23; 9:27; 10:1-2; 10:21; 1 Chronicles 1:4-5) - China, Hind, Sind, the
country of the Turks and that of the Khazars, as well as Tibet, the
country of the (Volga) Bulgars, Daylam, and the country neighboring on
Khurasan. In another passage Ya'qubi gives a kind of sequel to this. Peleg
(Genesis 10:25; 11:16-19; 1 Chronicles 1:19; 1:25) having divided the
earth in this fashion (Deuteronomy 32:8), the descendants of 'Amur
ibn-Tubal (Genesis 10:2; 1 Chronicles 1:5; Isaiah 66:19; Ezekiel 27:13;
32:26; 38:2-3; 39:1), a son of Japheth, went out to the northeast. One
group, the descendants of Togarmah (Genesis 10:3; 1 Chronicles 1:6;
Ezekiel 27:14; 38:6), proceeding farther north, were scattered in
different countries and became a number of kingdoms, among them the Burjan
(Bulgars), Alans, Khazars (Ashkenaz Genesis 10:3), and Armenians.
Similarly, according to Tabari, there were born to Japheth Jim-r the
Biblical Gomer (Genesis 10:2-3; 1 Chronicles 1:5-6; Ezekiel 38:6; Hosea
1:3), Maw'-' (read Mawgh-gh), Magog (Genesis 10:2; 1 Chronicles 1:5;
Ezekiel 38:2; 39:6; Revelation 20:8), Mawday Madai (Genesis 10:2; 1
Chronicles 1:5), Yawan (Javan) (Genesis 10:2; 10:4; 1 Chronicles 1:5; 1:7;
Isaiah 66:19; Ezekiel 27:13; 27:19), Thubal (Tubal), Mash-j (read
Mash-kh), Meshech (Genesis 10:2; 1 Chronicles 1:15; 1:17; Ezekiel 27:13;
32:26; 38:2-3; 39:1) and Tir-sh (Tiras). (Genesis 10:2; 1 Chronicles 1:5)
Of the descendants of the last were the Turks and the Khazars (Ashkenaz).
There is possibly an association here with the Turgesh, survivors of the
West Turks, who were defeated by the Arabs in 119/737, (H.A.R. Gibb, Arab
Conquests in Central Asia, London 1923, 83ff. Cf. Chapter IV, n. 96) and
disappeared as a ruling group in the same century. Tabari says curiously
that of the descendants of Mawgh-gh (Magog) were Yajuj and Majuj, adding
that these are to the east of the Turks and Khazars. This information
would invalidate Zeki Validi's attempt to identify Gog and Magog in the
Arabic writers with the Norwegians. The name Mash-kh (Meshech) is regarded
by him as probably a singular to the classical Massagetai (Massag-et). A
Bashmakov emphasizes the connection of 'Meshech' with the Khazars, to
establish his theory of the Khazars, not as Turks from inner Asia, but
what he calls a Jephetic or Alarodian group from south of the Caucasus.

Evidently there is no stereotyped form of this legendary relationship
of the Khazars to Japheth. The Taj-al-Artis says that according to some
they are the descendants of Kash-h (? Mash-h or Mash-kh, for Meshech), son
of Japheth, and according to others both the Khazars and the Saqalibah are
sprung from Thubal (Tubal). Further, we read of Balanjar ibn-Japheth in
ibn-al-Faqih and abu-al-Fida' as the founder of the town of Balanjar.
Usage leads one to suppose that this is equivalent to giving Balanjar a
separate racial identity. In historical times Balanjar was a well-known
Khazar center, which is even mentioned by Masudi as their capital. It is
hardly necessary to cite more of these Japheth stories. Their Jewish
origin is priori obvious, and Poliak has drawn attention to one version of
the division of the earth, where the Hebrew words for 'north' and 'south'
actually appear in the Arabic text. The Iranian cycle of legend had a
similar tradition, according to which the hero Afridun divided the earth
among his sons, Tuj (sometimes Tur, the eponym of Turan), Salm, and Iraj.
Here the Khazars appear with the Turks and the Chinese in the portion
assigned to Tuj, the eldest son. Some of the stories connect the Khazars
with Abraham. The tale of a meeting in Khurasan between the sons of
Keturah (Genesis 25:1; 25:4; 1 Chronicles 1:32-33) and the Khazars
(Ashkenaz) (Genesis 10:3) where the Khaqan is Khaqan is mentioned is
quoted from the Sa'd and al-Tabari by Poliak. The tradition also appears
in the Meshed manuscript of ibn-al-Faqih, apparently as part of the
account of Tamim ibn-Babr's journey to the Uigurs, but it goes back to
Hishim al-Kalbi. Zeki Validi is inclined to lay some stress on it as a
real indication of the presence of the Khazars in this region at an early
date. Al-Jahiz similarly refers to the legend of the sons of Abraham and
Keturah settling in Khurasan but does not mention the Khazars.
Al-Di-mashqi says that according to one tradition the Turks were the
children of Abraham by Keturah, whose father belonged to the original Arab
stock. Descendants of other sons of Abraham, namely the Soghdians and the
Kirgiz, were also said to live beyond the Oxus..." (The History of The
Jewish Khazars, by D.M. Dunlop, pp. 4-15. This book is especially
important because the Jews make reference to it in all of their Jewish
Encyclopedias, and uphold him as an authority on Jewish History)

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