"Modern Israeli Not Semitic Descendants Of Abraham?"

 A Russian archaeologist says he has found the lost capital of the Khazars, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism as its official religion more than 1,000 years ago, only to disappear leaving little trace of its culture.

Kevin Brook, the American author of "The Jews of Khazaria," e-mailed Wednesday that he has followed the Itil dig over the years, and even though it has yielded no Jewish artifacts, "Now I'm as confident as the archaeological team is that they've truly found the long-lost city."

The Khazars were a Turkic tribe that roamed the steppes from Northern China to the Black Sea. Between the 7th and 10th centuries they conquered huge swaths of what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, the Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia as far as the Aral Sea.

The Khazars' ruling dynasty and nobility converted to Judaism sometime in the 8th or 9th centuries. Vasilyev said the limited number of Jewish religious artifacts such as mezuzas and Stars of David found at other Khazar sites prove that ordinary Khazars preferred traditional beliefs such as shamanism, or newly introduced religions including Islam.

Yevgeny Satanovsky, director of the Middle Eastern Institute in Moscow, said he believes the Khazar elite chose Judaism out of political expediency — to remain independent of neighboring Muslim and Christian states. "They embraced Judaism because they wanted to remain neutral, like Switzerland these days," he said.

In particular, he said, the Khazars opposed the Arab advance into the Caucasus Mountains and were instrumental in containing a Muslim push toward eastern Europe. He compared their role in eastern Europe to that of the French knights who defeated Arab forces at the Battle of Tours in France in 732.

The Khazars succeeded in holding off the Arabs, but a young, expanding Russian state vanquished the Khazar empire in the late 10th century. Medieval Russian epic poems mention Russian warriors fighting the "Jewish Giant."

In an ethnic sense, an Ashkenazi Jew is one whose ancestry can be traced to the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. For roughly a thousand years, the Ashkenazim were a reproductively isolated population in Europe, despite living in many countries, with little inflow or outflow from migration, conversion, or intermarriage with other groups, including other Jews. Human geneticists have identified genetic variations that have high frequencies among Ashkenazi Jews, but not in the general European population.

A study by Michael Seldin, a geneticist at the University of California Davis School of Medicine, found Ashkenazi Jews to be a clear, relatively homogenous genetic subgroup. Strikingly, regardless of the place of origin, Ashkenazi Jews can be grouped in the same genetic cohort — that is, regardless of whether an Ashkenazi Jew's ancestors came from Poland, Russia, Hungary, Lithuania, or any other place with a historical Jewish population, they belong to the same ethnic group.

Of the estimated 8.8 million Jews living in Europe at the beginning of World War II, the majority of whom were Ashkenazi, about 6 million — more than two-thirds — were systematically murdered in the Holocaust. These included 3 million of 3.3 million Polish Jews (91%); 900,000 of 1.1 million in Ukraine (82%); and 50–90% of the Jews of other Slavic nations, Germany, France, Hungary, and the Baltic states. Sephardi communities suffered similar depletions in a few countries, including Greece, the Netherlands and the former Yugoslavia. Many of the surviving Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to countries such as Israel, Australia, and the United States after the war.

Today, Ashkenazi Jews constitute the largest group among Jews, but comprise a slight minority of Israeli Jews (see Demographics of Israel). However, they have played a prominent role in the economy, media, and politics of Israel since its founding. Tensions have sometimes arisen between the traditional Jews of the Middle East (the Sephardim and Mizrahim) and the mostly European Ashkenazim who founded Israel. Later migrants hailing from the various non-Ashkenazi groups sometimes claim that they are discriminated against in terms of education, jobs/income, housing and in other areas.

Literature about the alleged Turkic origin of the Ashkenazi population, as descendants of the Jewish population, converts or otherwise, appeared mainly after 1950. Although it has been speculated that the peaceful life lived by the Jews of Khazaria was contrived or exaggerated, and publicized primarily in an effort to shame European leaders into treating their Jewish populations better, the Jewish-Khazar thesis is used today primarily as a whipping horse for antisemites claiming that the Ashkenazim are actually not semites. This dubious theory holds that Ashkenazim should be hated for pretending to be "real" Jews, instead of because they are actually Jewish. In any case, most scholarship on the subject dismisses the Khazar-Ashkenazi relationship, if not rejecting the portrayed Jewish golden age of Khazaria altogether.

    Many persons would be shocked at the possibility that the Jewish founders of the modern Zionist State of Israel are not Semitic descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but rather the descendants of a powerful Eastern European ethnic group that converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. As I see it, the discovery of the ancient Khazar kingdom lends much credence to that possibility. In other words, there is the distinct possibility that most Jews of today, especially the founders and leaders of the Zionist regime of Israel  are not "real Jews" genetically. The implications of this is the Zionist state of Israel and the long time occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are carried out by  descendants of an ethnic group that never lived in Palestine until 1947. The Palestinian Arabs, Jews and Christians had peaceably lived together for many centuries before the Jews from Europe took over Palestine with the sanction of the UN in 1947. For the record, I am not anti-Semitic. I am however, anti-Zionist occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza and the hard line Zionist agenda to drive the Palestinian Arabs completely out of Palestine, possibly by descendants of an ethnic group that doesn't have legitimate claim to Palestine at all.

tags: ashkanazi jews  israel  palestine  middle east  zionism  war  warpeace  west bank  gaza  war on terror  

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