Rating: 
Summary: Hold the Strudel and Pass the Baklava
Review: Back in the 1970s, Arthur Koestler, author of "Darkness at Noon", wrote this amazingly innovative book. I read it in Rarotonga in 1980---a suitably exotic place to read a serious book on a rather exotic topic. Recently I returned to it, though I long ago disagreed with the author's main conclusions.
In the first 121 pages, Koestler describes the history of a long-vanished, Turkic people called the Khazars, whose ruler, faced with pressure from both Muslim and Christian nations around them, took the radical step of converting to Judaism. As this is one of the very few instances (if not the single one) in history of such a royal move, the Khazars have attracted scholarly attention ever since, particularly, but not only, from Jews. Indeed, you can log on to a Khazar Studies website today. For another, less factual view of this interesting tribe, you can read Milorad Pavic's poetic, absurdist novel "Dictionary of the Khazars". In any case, Koestler's history makes fascinating reading, containing accounts by ancient Arab travellers, stories of Jewish crusaders in northern Iraq, and descriptions of the links to Vikings, Byzantium, Islam, and Magyars. I have no professional knowledge as to how accurate it all is, but if I were awarding stars for good history writing, I'd give five here.
However, THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE is not just a history. In the remainder of the book, Koestler constructs an argument for the Eastern European Jews' being the descendants of these Khazars. He asks where the Khazars all disappeared to. He says population statistics from the period 1300-1500 bear evidence that there could not have been so many Jews to be killed by the brutal Bogdan Khmielnitsky in the great massacres of 1648-49 in the Ukraine unless the Khazars had become the Polish-Ukrainian Jews by then. He deals in some dubious racial theorizing, throws in a few arguments based on place names, and concludes that the "original stock" of the Jews was predominantly Turkish. This theorizing turned me off back in 1980 and it still does. As an anthropologist, I have to ask: in all cases known in history, when a people converts en masse to another religion, a large body of pre-existing language and culture always remains. Why not with the supposed Khazar-Jews ? Is there an element of Turkish in Yiddish ? No. Are there any kinds of nomadic or Turkish cultural behaviors among the Eastern European Jews ? The answer is no. This would be just about impossible if Koestler's theory were correct. Secondly, to rely on statistics gleaned from medieval records is extremely dubioius especially when the Jews were hardly deemed members of European society and may never have been counted. Numbers of people killed or born were routinely exaggerated or ignored all over Europe. I rejected Koestler's theory 24 years ago. Since then, DNA research, unknown at the time, has shown that most Eastern European Jews have a mixed Semitic and European heritage. Despite the passage of many centuries, genetically the closest people to them are still the Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians. Koestler's theory remains only an interesting thought. It is worth reading for the historical part and to see how convincing incorrect theories can still be.
Rating: 
Summary: This book was written between July 1973 and August 1974
Review: "In Khazaria, sheep, honey and Jews exist in large quantities." Thus the Arab geographer Muqaddasi, writing in the tenth century. Other references to the mysterious land of Khazaria sounded equally puzzling. I first heard about that country as a schoolboy in my native Hungary. The Khazars were supposed to have been related to the Magyars, and were thus briefly mentioned in the school history-books - which also mentioned the legendary tale of a Khazar King's conversion to Judaism on the bidding of an angel who appeared to him in a dream. Later I read a treatise by Jehuda Halevi, the famous Jewish poet and philosopher, who lived in Moorish Spain 1085-1141, and died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Al Kuzari, the Khazars, was written a year before his death. It is a theological tract, propounding the view that the Jewish nation is the sole mediator between God and the rest of mankind. At the end of History, all other nations will be converted to Judaism; and the conversion of the Khazar King appears as a prelude or token of that ultimate event. The treatise contains no factual information about the Khazar country itself, which serves merely as a background for the account of the conversion - the King, the dream, the angel - and for long dialogues on theology. Yet later I discovered that Halevi's tract was virtually all that people incomparably better versed in Judaism than I knew about this crucially important chapter in the history of world Jewry. Nor did I learn more about it during all the years of involvement in the Jewish problem. It was some fifteen years after the re-birth of Israel - which I thought to be the end of the involvement - that the true significance of the Khazar problem began to dawn on me. My interest in it was first aroused by a chance encounter with a French Orientalist - whose name I have, ungratefully, forgotten - while I was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. He gave me a rough outline of the historical facts about the Khazars, and alleged that Jewish historians have deliberately played down the importance of the subject, because of its potentially explosive implications. However, another ten years were to pass until I got really immersed in research into Khazar history [during 1973-1974]. Our knowledge of it is mainly derived from Arab, Byzantine, Russian and Hebrew sources with corroborative evidence of Persian, Syrian, Armenian, Georgian and Turkish origin. Most of these sources I found available in translations in various specialised libraries, and there was also much information to be gathered from modern historians - Toynbee, Bury, Vernadsky, Dunlop - who had written on some aspect of Khazar history. Thus the jigsaw gradually fell into place and resulted in The Thirteenth Tribe - The Khazar Empire and its Heritage (1976). I cannot claim to have discovered any previously unknown facts; merely to have assembled the bits of the puzzle, most of them known only to scholars with a specialised interest in Eastern mediaeval history. - from BRICKS TO BABEL (1980), pages 305-306
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but be skeptical
Review: Although a good book, take this work with a grain of salt. Koestler comes to many conclusions that are debatable and thinly founded. "The Thirteenth Tribe" is better for proposing ideas and possibilities than for defining truths. If you are interested in the Khazars, I would recommend Kevin Alan Brook's "The Jews of Khazaria" -- which supports some of Koestler's conclusions, but refutes others.I agree with Edgar that Ashkenazi Judaism has nothing in common with Caucasian customs and very much in direct contradiction. However, I do not recall Koestler ever stating that the Khazars ever had caucasian customs. Although Caucasians and Khazars definitely mixed (to what extent, who can know?), Caucasian peoples lived in and around the Caucasus mountains long before the Khazars. Nevertheless, it leads to an important question about the presence of Judaism in the Caucasus and around the Black Sea long before the Khazars. Koestler does a poor job of discussing these peoples, their background, where they came from and their customs -- while he quickly comes to a conclusion that most Jews today are descended from the Khazars, a conclusion which is at best hypothetical. Read "The Thirteenth Tribe", you'll probably enjoy it, then continue to read Kevin Alan Brook's "The Jews of Khazaria," and check as many of the sources of both works as possible. More information and more study on this subject will bring us closer to reality -- which is what I would guess most people reading these works are looking for.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but be skeptical
Review: Although a good book, take this work with a grain of salt. Koestler comes to many conclusions that are debatable and thinly founded. "The Thirteenth Tribe" is better for proposing ideas and possibilities than for defining truths. If you are interested in the Khazars, I would recommend Kevin Alan Brook's "The Jews of Khazaria" -- which supports some of Koestler's conclusions, but refutes others. I agree with Edgar that Ashkenazi Judaism has nothing in common with Caucasian customs and very much in direct contradiction. However, I do not recall Koestler ever stating that the Khazars ever had caucasian customs. Although Caucasians and Khazars definitely mixed (to what extent, who can know?), Caucasian peoples lived in and around the Caucasus mountains long before the Khazars. Nevertheless, it leads to an important question about the presence of Judaism in the Caucasus and around the Black Sea long before the Khazars. Koestler does a poor job of discussing these peoples, their background, where they came from and their customs -- while he quickly comes to a conclusion that most Jews today are descended from the Khazars, a conclusion which is at best hypothetical. Read "The Thirteenth Tribe", you'll probably enjoy it, then continue to read Kevin Alan Brook's "The Jews of Khazaria," and check as many of the sources of both works as possible. More information and more study on this subject will bring us closer to reality -- which is what I would guess most people reading these works are looking for.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting hypothesis
Review: Arthur Koestler had a long and illustrious writing career. Many of us were captivated by "Darkness at Noon," "Thieves in the Night," Promise and Fulfilment," "The Sleepwalkers," "The Trail of the Dinosaur," and many other great works. This book, from 1976, is about the Khazars, a people of Turkish stock that lived to the northeast of the Black Sea and converted to Judaism in the eighth century AD.
The obvious question, which had been asked by many people prior to Koestler, is to what extent the Khazars are the ancestors of the Ashkenazic Jews. Koestler suspected it is to a great extent.
I think there is substantial evidence that many Khazars did in fact convert to Judaism. And there is also some evidence that the initial number of Jews who wound up in the major Jewish population centers of Eastern Europe via the Middle East and Germany was rather small. That suggested to Koestler that the presumably more numerous Khazars dominated the Jewish population in Eastern Europe 1000 years ago and that they are the principal ancestors of today's Ashkenazic Jews. However, it seems that recent scholarship has not given much support to this guess. On the contrary, genetic evidence has strongly indicated that the small number of Jews coming from Germany may well have been by far the main ancestors of today's Ashkenazim.
As Koestler feared, his hypothesis has been quoted by those trying to find an excuse to deny present-day Israelis their rights to their homes. That is why Koestler explains that whether the genes of Israel's people are of Khazar, Spanish, Roman, or Semitic origin is irrelevant. It "cannot affect Israel's right to exist - nor the moral obligation of any civilized person, Gentile or Jew - to defend that right."
In any case, I found the book interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but disproven
Review: Even though this book was well-written and contains a lot of fascinating information about the Khazarian Empire, I have to rate it one star because its thesis -- which is what most people take away from it -- has been completely disproven. Just yesterday (May 10) the New York Times ran an article in its science section about DNA testing on certain markers in the Y chromosome that are present in the majority of Jews in ALL communities -- Sephardic and Ashkenazic. (The markers on Ethiopian Jews are not so clear-cut.) As the article itself stated, these tests finally disprove theories that the majority of Ashkenazic Jews are descended from converts. In fact, the studies show that a surprisingly SMALL number of Jews are descended from converts -- less even than most Orthodox Jews would have assumed. I do not think there is anything "less valid" about being descended from a convert, so Koestler's theory didn't bother me that much even before I read about these tests. But now that the book has been so conclusively proven wrong, it should be reprinted with an appropriate disclaimer.
Rating: 
Summary: A 'second the motion'review
Review: I 'second the motion' of the review written by Mr. Mirsky. I think he analyzes in a very good way the whole thrust of Koestler's argument in trying to prove that Ashkenazi Jews are fundamentally not a Semitic people. He also brings to bear what I understand to be , the genetic testing on that matter which do show that Jews of all type have some kind of 'genetic connection between them.'
I do not however understand one major thing i.e. why for Koestler it is important to show that the Jews are not Semitic. Is this to show that they are allegedly strangers in the Middle East, and so have no ' genetic right' (if there is such a thing) to the land of Israel.
I join Mr. Mirsky in thinking that in some way the whole controversy aroused by this book, as to where the Jews have their origin is irrelevant. Judaism is a question of sharing a common tradition, faith, culture and therefore its 'racial component or preferably biological component' is secondary. What's important in regard to geography and every Jew, including Jewish converts is not what region of the world their ancestors may have come from but whether the eyes, minds and hearts are devoted to realizing the Biblical promise of return to the land of Israel.
Rating:
Summary: Certainly an interesting idea.
Review: I admit to having read this book. I do not admit to being a crackpot. I say that because of the three people that I know who have read this book, two are crackpots and I'm not one of them. (Please read the other two reviews.) They are slightly more interesting than the book.
The book has a point to make: Eastern European Jews are not descendants of David.
My thought on that? Whew, that let's me off the hook! Now I can't be blamed for the death of Jesus. Is there any way that we can take back the Holocaust, the pogroms, the nasty comments, the insults, the Inquisition and some of the teachings of the Catholic Church? Uh... I didn't think so. I've long ago gotten over any discomfort I might have felt when hearing a Jew joke. As a matter of fact, after visiting the Holocaust memorial in Washington, I sent a friend a postcard with this message:
Wishing you were here. There... that feels better. Now what was I saying about crackpots
Rating:
Summary: A thought-provoking essay on the nature of Jewishness
Review: I am not a good enough historian to know whether the author's main thesis - that the Khazars converted to Judaism - is credible. What I thought more interesting was his comment that there might be no such thing as a Jewish "race" in any usual sense in which the word is used. He notes the awful irony of that in relation to the holocaust. This is definitely not an anti-semitic book, just one that takes an unconventional view - a trademark of Koestler's writing.
Rating: 
Summary: The truth about history's greatest & most enduring deception
Review: I had read this important book years ago and now have found it again. It sets right the story of a people who have long used a false identity that has served them well, a fact that should have become obvious because of their lack of Semitic attributes. The blue eyes & red hair often found in so-called modern "Jews" is a dead giveaway of this.
Koestler documents and analyzes how the movement of Jews into Europe never reached farther east than the western edge of Germany and how these few (according to "Jewish" census sources)
left the area due to the pressures and violence related to the Plague epidemics when many were killed. When masses of "Jews"
from Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Prussia moved into Eastern Germany after the twelfth century, the amounts were prodigious
- not the few stragglers that might have been found had they remained in Germany and moved East after the Bubonic Plagues.
The so-called Jewish Pale actually comprised much of the territory that had been the domain of the Khazars since late in the fifth century AD, basically the same people in the same area.
One should remember that the conversion to Judaism was political and not religious, so that most of the converted Khazars remained
pagan or atheistic. Centuries later, Irving Kristol in his book Neo-Conservatism stated that "the Jewish people discovered in the XVIII century that there was no god." As B'Nai B'Rith documentaries shown on PBS attest, modern "Judaism" is more than anything else a way of life - except for the minority among the Ashkenazi (Khazars) who had become Orthodox "Jews" - whose religion is the basis for their lives.
The Koestler comment that the modern "Jews" are more related to
Attila than to Solomon and David is of course true. A team of
archaeologists sent by the state of Israel to verify Koestler's claims, found about the same facts that the writer had.
It is a pity that the Bolsheviks in Russia, themselves for the most part - the overwhelming part - Khazar "Jews", found it convenient to flood the existing Khazar fortress of Sarkel, perhaps to eradicate any possibility of it being found where their own roots lied.
NOTE: In the fifth century AD, Leo III, the Isaurian, emperor
of Byzantium had the Jews remaining around the Mediterranean after the Roman destruction of Israel/Judea in AD70 and after the Bar Kohba uprising, c.AD135, picked up and sent to Khazaria, but these numbers were a tiny drop into the one million or more
Khazars and their allies - which had been the Pecheneg, the Maggyar, the Alani, the Huns, Turks, and others - all of them scattered over an area larger than the United States.
|
