shalom... i wonder if anyone here has an opinion on arthur koestler's book _the thirteenth tribe_ ( i think that was it) ---> anyways, the premise is that the jewry of eastern europe, whose language is yiddish, were where they were as the result of a mass-conversion of all the peoples of khazaria to "basic" judaism back ~ 10th century c.e. jus' wunnerin' /gnrmi
I'm not familiar with the book. If he's saying Ashkenazim are the Khazars, then he is very far from correct. Also, what is "basic" Judaism? You can find tons of information on Jewish genetics research here: http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html But if you don't want to look through the abstracts of all the studies, what would answer your questions is summed up on the first page -- the bullets from the page have been replaced with other markings as they did not copy over, and the emphasis is mine: Hope that answers your question. Dauer
http://198.62.75.1/www2/koestler/ the book... & by "basic" i meant, well, "primative" in the sense of a jewish theology developed without recourse to the previous millenium of jewish studies (talmud, haftorah, etc...)
His ideas have existed for a while, along with other ideas. But the new genetics research has pretty much blown theories like his out of the water. That's not to say the Khazars didn't convert. There's even a treatise written by Yehuda HaLevi as a fictional dialogue between a Jew and the king of the Khazars. I'm still not sure I understand what you mean by basic. The haftarah is simply a reading from the prophets that accompanies the Torah reading. Some of the words in the Talmud predate this past millenium. Do you mean that they became Karaites? Karaites reject everything except the Tanach (Jewish scriptures) itself. Dauer
Is this the same guy that says that the Khazars were converted to judaism by a race of interdimensional lizard aliens?
I remember reading about a genetic study done in Isreal. The researchers studied groups of Ashkanzi,and Sephardic Jews and Palistinians. The results of the reasearch proved that all three groups had a common ancestor. I just remembered this of the top of my head but unfortunately I have no links that would have more info on this particular study...
