Who Are The Khazarians?

Who are Khazarians? by Rabbi Green

Question:

Who are Khazarians? Was the modern State of Israel was founded by a so-called Khazarian mafia? And are the Jews who live there actual Jews? Or are they Khazarian?

Answer:

The vast majority of Jews living in our Holy Land are authentic Jews, Judean descendants of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi, but all descendants of Abraham Isaac Jacob Sarah Rebecca Rachel and Leah.

There was once a nation of ethnically Turkic people called Khazars in the Volga River delta area who converted to Judaism en masse over 1,200 years ago, but this people was conquered by the Kievan Rus in circa 969 CE.

There is no doubt that some of these Khazarian converts may have resettled in established Jewish communities, but the vast majority are assumed to have remained and intermingled with other local tribes. Their descendants are thought to be interspersed throughout the non-Jewish populations of Crimea, Russia, Ukraine, Hungary.

At that time there were no Jews living in any of those places, or anywhere else in Eastern Europe, for that matter. It's highly implausible that any Khazars were able to resettle in the Franco-German or Iberian Jewish centers that existed in Europe at that time. Rather, it's more likely that they may have fled to Jewish communities in the Caucasian mountains. There is also speculation that some Khazarian descendants may have retained some sort of Jewish identity in the form of Karaitism in Crimea, but even these communities disappeared centuries ago.

Even if it is true that Khazarian converts settled in other Jewish communities, these individuals must be presumed to be righteous Jews like all others. There is no evidence suggesting any sort of conspiracy at that time, and we are commanded to "love the convert" in our midst [1].

Compromised individuals who founded the modern-day state of Israel were secularist Jews who had forsaken their Jewish faith. They were not Khazarian.

The cabal of bankers who funded the Zionist enterprise, among other subversive movements like Communism and Fascism, weren't Jewish either, although some of these super-wealthy rogues descended from Jewish families (like Rothschild, Schiff, etc, and probably Rockefeller too), but their ancestors had long since abandoned the Jewish faith for an illegitimate deviant off-shoot of Judaism called Sabbatean Frankism. Their descendants lost any association to the Jewish people.

This cult is still popular among the super wealthy. Nowadays it's known as the Cult of the "All-Seeing Eye," the pagan symbol of which is printed on their dollar bill. Tragically, there are influential followers of this cult who have stealthily hid themselves among the Jewish population and claim to be Jews.

This phenomenon exists in other religious groups too. The Vatican was subverted by similar secret societies too centuries ago, as was Islam. The antinomian theosophy of all these imposters is the same, and it's likely they're all aligned with the progenitors of "Enlightenment" and Communism, i.e. the so- called Illuminati. While there's certainly a mafia, the claim that it's “Khazarian” is without merit or any historical basis. There’s an obvious conspiracy, but it likely has nothing to do with the historic Khazarian people of a millennia ago. 

A persistent canard claims that Jews from Eastern Europe are Khazarian and not authentic Jews. As I mentioned above, this is patently false.

Jews have been historically expelled from land to land over the past nineteen centuries. After expulsions from many lands in Europe and due to increasing persecution in the Germanies, Jews began migrating eastward to the Polish Empire in the fifteenth century CE where they found a relatively safe haven. By the 1600’s, Eastern Europe emerged as the largest population center of Jews in the world. The majority of these Jewish families had emigrated from what was originally the Franco-German center of Jewish population in the Diaspora. That's why Jews from Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, a Germanic language.

Jews had referred to Germany as “Ashkenaz,” a Biblical ancestor from the children of Jafeth [2], hence they are sometimes knows as “Ashkenazic” Jews, as opposed to “Sephardic” Jews who hailed from the Iberian Peninsula [3].

The Jews who formed the Franco-German center had first settled in the Rhineland in the ninth century CE. These Jews had emigrated from Rome at the behest of Charlemagne. Their ancestors had settled in Rome centuries earlier, during the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in 69 CE and its aftermath.

In fact, the term Ashkenaz may have originally been applied to places in the Italian peninsula where Judean exiles settled. Josephus wrote that Jews had a tradition that they city of Reggio di Calabria was founded by Ashkenaz himself, the grandson of Jafeth. Presumably the Jews of Ashkenaz were so-called because they had once lived in areas in Italy that were attributed to this Biblical ancestor.

The Jews of Rome were descendants of Judean exiles, and so were the Jews of Ashkenaz. The claim that they are any less authentic than their Sephardic or Mizrahi counterparts is false.

The Khazarian canard should be soundly rejected by any objective student of history.

Likewise, the very notion that Khazars were imposters is odious and should be rejected. Once they join the Jewish people, sincere converts are as Jewish as Moses. Let’s stop perpetuating this lie, an insult to the most cherished members of our Jewish communities. King David's great grandmother was a Moabite convert, Ruth. Did that fact make David any less Jewish?

Please. Let's toss the Khazar canard into the waste bin of history where it belongs, along with other false beliefs like the Blood Libel et al.

Don't blame the world's problems on Jews, and don't blame them on Jewish converts either.

Notes:

[1] Deuteronomy 10:19.

[2] Genesis 10:3, Jeremiah 51:27, Chronicles I 1:6. It's not clear why the Rhineland was thought to be a land belonging to Ashkenaz per se. Josephus wrote that Jews had a tradition that the ancient city of Reggio di Calabria, the “toe” of the Italian peninsula, was founded by Ashkenaz of scripture.

[3] Jews referred to Spain as “Sepharad,” invoking the location mentioned in Obadiah 20.

Source: R' G