Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland
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to Arthur Koestler's book The Thirteenth
Tribe Details
of other book reviews of The Thirteenth
Tribe The
Medieval Jewish Kingdom of the Khazars,
740-1259 Khazaria.com:
A Resource for Turkic and Jewish History in Russia and
Ukraine Since 1948, when Zionists
succeeded in carving out a Jewish state from the land of the
Palestinians, the question "who is a Jew" has been endlessly
debated. Zionists (both Christian and Jewish) often declare
that "God gave the land" of Palestine "to the Jews." They
infer that God deeded territories, in perpetuity, to a
biblical tribe of Oriental Middle Eastern people. Since
millions of American Christians accept a dogma that God has
a Chosen Land and a Chosen People (the Jews), then the
question "who is a Jew?" takes on political connotations
that impinge on national and international
decisions. In his carefully researched
book entitled The Thirteenth Tribe, Arthur Koestler
refutes the idea of a Jewish "race." Moreover, he says that
most Jews of the contemporary world did not come from
Palestine and are not even of Semitic origin. His research
shows that most Jews originated in what today is the Soviet
Union. And that a group of people there became Jews through
conversion, on the orders of their king. "The bulk of modern
Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin,"
Koestler writes. "Their ancestors came not from the Jordan
but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus."
And he stresses: While Jews of different origin
also contributed to the existing Jewish world community,
"the main bulk originated from the Khazar country" in the
USSR. Koestler, a Jew born in 1905 in Budapest, writes that
the Khazars, who flourished from the 7th to the 11th
century, were a major power. Their empire extended from the
Black Sea to the Caspian and from the Caucasus to the Volga.
They were located "between two major world powers: the
Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium and the triumphant
followers of Muhammad." Since the world was polarized
between these two superpowers representing Christianity and
Islam, the Khazar Empire, representing a Third
Force, Not wishing to be dominated by
either of the two, the Khazar king "embraced the Jewish
faith" in AD 740 and ordered his subjects to do the same.
Judaism thus became the state religion of the Khazars. The
king's motives in adopting Judaism, Koestler stresses, were
purely political. At the peak of its power, from the seventh
to the tenth centuries AD, the Khazar kingdom controlled or
exacted tribute from some 30 different nations and tribes
inhabiting the vast territories between the Caucasus , the
Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, the town of Kiev and the
Ukrainian steppes. People under Khazar suzerainty included
the Bulgars, Burtas, Ghuzz, Magyars (Hungarians), the Gothic
and Greek colonies of the Crimea, and the Slavonic tribes in
the northwestern woodland. According to The Jewish
Encyclopedia, in the 16th century Jews numbered about
one million. Koestler quotes scholars as documenting that
"the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were
Khazars." Koestler, who after the Second World War became a
British citizen, and whose most famous book, Darkness at
Noon, was translated into 33 languages, has one main
thesis: the bulk of Eastern Jewry -and hence of world Jewry
is of Khazar-Turkish, rather than Semitic,
origin. As Koestier points out, Jews of
our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and
Ashkenazim. The Sephardi, descendants of the Jews who had
lived in Spain until their expulsion, with the Muslims, at
the end of the 15th century, and who later settled in the
countries bordering on the Mediterranean, spoke a
Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino. In the 1960s, the Sephardim
numbered about 500,000. The Ashkenazim, at the same period,
were about 11 million. Thus, "in common parlance, Jew is
practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew." However, Koestler adds, the
term Ashkenazim is misleading because it is generally
applied to Germany, thus contributing to the legend that
modem Jewry originated on the Rhine. There is, however, no
other term to refer to the non-Sephardic majority of
contemporary Jewry,which came after conversion to Judaism
from the Khazar country. After the destruction of their
empire (in the 12th or 13th century), the Jewish Khazars
migrated into those regions of Eastern Europe, mainly Russia
and Poland, where, at the dawn of the modem age, the
greatest concentrations of Jews were found. It is "well
documented," Koestler writes, that the numerically and
socially dominant element in the Jewish population of
Hungary during the Middle Ages was of Khazar
origin. An Israeli scholar, A.N.
Poliak, a Tel Aviv University professor of medieval Jewish
history, quoted by Koestler, states that the descendants of
Khazar Jews, Since Israel's support among
millions of American Christians is founded on a concept that
God had bequeathed territory to a biblical "tribe" of
Oriental Middle Eastern Jews, it becomes ironic to learn
from Koestler's research that most Jews today are not
descended from natives of the "holy land," or even of the
Middle East. Koestler, who originally published The
Thirteenth Tribe in 1976, noted that the story of the
Khazar empire "begins to look like the most cruel hoax
history has ever perpetrated." The Palestinians, imprisoned
and brutalized by Zionism's "hoax," would be the first to
agree. Needless to say, the book has been difficult to find.
It disappears from many library shelves. A check at the
Library of Congress reveals that the most prestigious
library of our land had one reading copy. That one copy,
however, is "missing from the shelf. Grace Halsell is a
journalist based in Washington, DC, USA, and the author of
more than 10 books. © The Washington Report
For Middle East Affairs, 1991
In "Review of The Thirteenth
Tribe by Arthur Koestler," Grace Halsell states
pointedly: "A check at the Library of
Congress reveals that the most prestigious library of our
land had one reading copy. That one copy, however, is
'missing from the shelf." Well, Grace, I found secret
place where those Khazari imposters hid all those copies of
this forbidden book. Go to http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch
and search for 'The
Thirteenth Tribe' and you'll find 57 copies. I agree it's an
interesting thesis, but there is no need to imply that the
sinister International Jewish Conspiracy has buried it.
Anyway, I'd like to see what modern genetics has to say
about it. If we can determine that Sally Heming had
Jefferson's children, surely we can test Keostler's thesis!
Gerald Kaiser
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD A FREE PDF OF THIS BOOK HERE
This review first appeared in
The Washington Report For Middle East Affairs, June
1991
"A
check at the Library of Congress reveals that the most
prestigious library of our land had one reading copy.
That one copy, however, is 'missing from the shelf' "
.
"The mainstream of
Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean
across France and Germany to the east and then back
again. The stream moved in a consistently western
direction, from the Caucasus, from the Ukraine into
Poland and thence into Central Europe."
"Could only
maintain its independence by accepting neither
Christianity nor Islam - for either choice would have
automatically subordinated it to the authority of the
Roman Emperor or the Caliph of Baghdad."
"those who stayed
where they were (in Khazaria), those who emigrated to the
United States and to other countries, and those who went
to Israel - constitute now the large majority of world
Jewry."
Editors Note: on 23rd March
2002 we received the following e-mail from Gerald
Kaiser: