By Rev. Ted Pike

Editor's Note: This article is from my book "Israel: Our Duty, Our Dilemma." This pivotal, 345-page book, the whole story of Zionist conspiracy, is available for $24.90 postpaid at Truthtellers.org. from National Prayer Network, P.O. Box 828, Clackamas, OR 97015. An audio recording of this article is available here.

Are Most Jews Descendants of Abraham…or the Khazars?

The greatest source of pride for Jews is their belief that they are the blood descendants of Abraham. Out of that conviction has come not only identity but deep comfort through the ages.



Modern scholarship, however, has begun to question whether all who consider themselves Jews are in fact Jews at all. There is mounting evidence that the great majority of Jews today (the Ashkenazim or Eastern European Jews) are not the offspring of Abraham but descendants of the ancient Central European nation of Khazaria, converted to Judaism in 740 A.D.



Khazaria’s conversion to Judaism is unquestioned. What remains in doubt is what became of the roughly million Khazarians in the centuries following conversion. Did they dissolve into the nations of Central Europe? Or did they remain relatively intact, migrating to such countries as Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, laying the foundation for the massive “Jewish” populations of Eastern Europe — the source of most Jews living in Russia and the United States today?



To begin to unravel this question we will turn to the articles on Khazars in the Encyclopedia Judaica, the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Thirteenth Tribe, (Random House, New York) the exhaustively researched study of the Khazars by the eminent modern Jewish writer, Arthur Koestler, will provide us not only with vital background information, but conclusion about the final destiny of the Khazars which the encyclopedias omit.



Who were the Khazars? Where had they come from? Koestler:



The country of the Khazars, a people of Turkish stock, occupied a strategic key position at the vital gateway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, where the great eastern powers of the period confronted each other. It acted as a buffer protecting Byzantium against invasions by the lusty barbarian tribesmen of the northern steppes — Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, etc. — and, later, the Vikings and the Russians. But equally, of even more importance both from the point of view of Byzantine diplomacy and of European history, is the fact that the Khazar armies effectively blocked the Arab avalanche in its most devastating early stages, and thus prevented the Muslim conquest of Eastern Europe. (Koestler, p. 13)

The Khazars, according to the Encyclopedia Judaica, may have been the descendants of Attila the Hun. Like other Turkish peoples they manifested the strongest warlike traits yet were often gifted with commercial and artistic genius. At the peak of their prosperity and power they exacted tribute from no fewer than 30 nations of Central Europe over whom they held undisputed dominion.

In Search of a Religion

However, during the 8th century, Khazaria found itself embarrassed. The other nations surrounding it were adopting the more advanced monotheistic religions of Byzantine Christianity or Islam, while Khazaria languished in the primitive superstitions of a nation of nomads and warriors. It was time for a new religion. In 740 A.D. the Khagan summoned representatives of Christianity, Islam and Judaism to his presence, each being provided with the opportunity to state its case. In the end Judaism was accepted as Khazaria’s new religion, probably because it carried no obligation for military alliances, as did Byzantine Christianity and Islam.



For over 400 years, well into the 13th century, Judaism thrived as the state religion of the people of Khazaria. The Khazars (whose most educated guess as to who might be their founding father would have been Attila the Hun) came to believe they were descendants not of the “Golden Horde” but of Abraham. The Khazars studied Hebrew, venerated the Talmud and Torah, yearned for the coming of Messiah, and actually hoped to soon retake Jerusalem from the Moslems and return to “the land of their forefathers.”



By the 9th century, however, the Vikings were already sending their fleets down the Volga and Don, threatening Khazaria. In the years to come the Khazars bitterly resisted intrusions of the Norsemen, protecting not only themselves from conquest, but Byzantium to the southwest.



Yet the Norsemen, or “Rus,” forefathers of modern Russians, gradually gained the upper hand while Khazaria declined. The Rus made an alliance with Khazaria’s traditional ally, Byzantium; and together in 1016 A.D. they treacherously invaded and conquered Khazaria, bringing to an end the autonomy of one of the most powerful and strategic nations of the ancient world.



In the following century the fabric of Khazarian life was further rent by invasions of the “Kumans,” a wild barbaric horde from the steppes of Asia. Yet far worse was the full scale invasion in 1245 of the terrible Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan. Before the terror of Genghis Khan, not only the Khazars but most inhabitants of Central Europe fled to the west. Yet the Khazars, traditionally a nation of nomads, had been migrating west and northwest for centuries, even before the earlier invasions of the Rus. By the time of the Mongols, Khazar communities were well established in Hungary and the Ukraine, in the Balkans, Southern Russia, in Slavic lands, in Lithuania, but most of all, Poland.

Poland: New “Promised Land” for Khazars

With the first awakenings of civilization in Poland, beginning with the founding of the first Piast dynasty in 962 A.D., the Khazars, because of their commercial background as artisans, middlemen and traders, were especially welcome as settlers. It was not long before one Polish city contained five synagogues, while many towns had at least two. In fact, complaints began to come before the magistrates that Khazar synagogues, because of their height and opulence, were putting Christian edifices to shame. Legislation was demanded to limit them in size and number. Yet, even as late as the 15th and 16th centuries, Khazars continued to arrive and prosper in Poland, making Poland the “new Khazaria” to roughly a half million displaced Khazars.



It was well into the 17th century before the racial isolation of the Khazar communities in Poland, Lithuania and Russia was significantly altered by contact with authentic descendants of Abraham from the west. During the Moslem conquests and after the Jewish exodus from Babylon in the 11th century, most “true” Jews had settled in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, especially Spain. Only relatively small numbers of such Jews inhabited Northern Europe. Despite claims by Jewish historians that mass migrations of authentic Jews moved east into Khazar territories as a result of such calamities as the Crusades, the Black Death and the Inquisition, Koestler thoroughly documents the absence of any historic basis for such alleged movements. Concerning genuine Jewish populations in the German Rhineland before and after the first Crusade, Koestler says:



The traditional conception of Jewish historians that the Crusades of 1096 swept like a broom a mass migration of German Jews into Poland is simply a legend — or rather an ad hoc hypothesis invented because, as they knew little of Khazar history, they could see no other way to account for the emergence, out of nowhere, of this unprecedented concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe. Yet there is not a single mention in the contemporary sources of any migration, large or small, from the Rhineland further east into Germany, not to mention distant Poland. (Koestler, p. 164.)

Authentic Jews Stay in the West

History records that from the Dark Ages through the Renaissance, authentic Jewry in Northern Europe constituted a pitifully small population. Such Jews did not respond to persecution, as Koestler points out, by migration, but by seeking what local protection they could find, only to return to their ransacked houses and synagogues. Such a situation is formidably opposed to Jewish prosperity in the lands of Northern Europe. In fact, German Jewry in the late Middle Ages hovered on the edge of extinction.



Imagine, then, the plight of the Jews when in 1348, the year of the Black Death, the suspicion erupted within the crazed inhabitants of Europe that Jews had begun the plague by poisoning Gentile wells. The effect of the resulting persecution was to nearly decimate the Jewish population in Germany. Yet such persecution did not move them eastward. There is no record of any of them escaping to Poland, as Jewish scholarship would have us believe. Nor is there record that in the centuries to come such an enfeebled German Jewish population would lay the foundation for the massive “Jewish” Ashkenazi populations in Poland. After suffering a plague brought on by rats and renewed persecution by men, the Austrian historian Kutschera describes the condition Jews of western Germany now found themselves in:





The populace avenged on them the cruel blows of destiny and set upon those whom the plague had spared with fire and sword. When the epidemics receded, Germany, according to contemporary historians, was left virtually without Jews. We are led to conclude that in Germany itself the Jews did not prosper, and were never able to establish large and populous communities. How then, in this circumstance should they have been able to lay the foundation in Poland of a mass population so dense that at present (AD 1909) it outnumbers the Jews of Germany at the rate of ten to one? It is indeed difficult to understand how the idea ever gained ground that the eastern Jews represent immigrants from the West, and especially from Germany.

Yet, next to the first crusade, the Black Death is most frequently invoked by historians as the dues ex machina which created Eastern Jewry. And, just as in the case of the Crusades, there is not a shred of evidence for this imaginary exodus.

Ultimately, the first widespread contact between Khazars and Jews of the west occurred as a result of the anti-Semitic Chmelnicky massacres in Poland of 1648-49. A wave of Khazar migration began out of Poland to the west, a migration which continued almost three centuries until World War II. It is out of that migration, beginning mid-point in the 17th century, that the principle Jewish settlements of Europe, the United States and Israel have been formed.

Yiddish — Language of Khazars

Koestler also comments on the supposed role of the Black Death in establishing Eastern Jewry:

Curiously, a study of Yiddish, the language of the Polish Khazars, also confirms the absence of authentic Jewry in Poland before the mid 17th century. Yiddish, of course, began as the Jewish “lingua franca” language of commerce. It combined Hebrew with the East-Middle German spoken by the German bourgeoisie class which dominated Polish culture during the period in which Yiddish was formed. Koestler points out that, if authentic Jews had been in Poland in the time of Yiddish’s evolution during and after the 15th century, then words of the West German dialect spoken by Jews of the West would also be found in Yiddish. Yet, according to Koestler, Yiddish is untainted by West German influence. In contrast to thousands of Hebrew, East German and Slavonic words in Yiddish, there is not a West German word to be found, proving that authentic Jews had no part in the cultural life which produced Yiddish.



If Jews from the west thus had been unable to influence Yiddish, which in the period of its formation was a linguistic “free-for-all” inviting the contributions of anyone, is it credible that they would have made any significant contribution to the gene pool of the Polish Khazars? Hardly. It cannot be denied that from the day Khazaria was converted to Judaism Jews worldwide had been vaguely aware of a Jewish state to the east, and some may even have visited and intermarried. Yet such infinitesimal commingling of genuine Jewish blood in the veins of hundreds of thousands of Khazars would not have compared to the much more frequent inbreeding which must have inevitably occurred between the Khazars and the Hungarians, Russians and Poles who surrounded them.

A Cruel Hoax

We have the strongest evidence, then, from historic and linguistic sources, that the Ashkenazi-Khazarian population of Eastern Europe (the source of most “Jews” today), if not 100-percent Gentile before the mid 17th century, was very near it. With this in mind, the Jewish claim that all Jews of Eastern Europe contain at least some of the blood of Abraham becomes spurious, the crudest attempt to preserve the Ashkenazim from being as Gentile as the verdict of history decrees them to be. Rejecting history, Khazar-Jewish scholarship scrabbles for even the smallest claim to the patrimony of Abraham, since such is essential not only to the self esteem of Eastern European “Jewry” but to legitimize the present Jewish claim to Palestine, a claim which has been most insistently made by those of Khazar origin.



But, as Koestler documents so formidably, the most any Eastern European “Jew” can claim with confidence is that his forefathers were converted to Judaism out of paganism. As Koestler (himself most likely a German Jew of Khazar origin) laconically concludes: “The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”





Note:

For a full discussion of the spiritual significance of the Khazar infusion from a Biblical perspective, take this link to my article: Are "Jews" Really Khazars?