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Khazars and Jews

Darat said:
Unless someone can provide the deeds to a particular piece of land signed by "A God, Inc. - Low Cost Biospheres a Speciality" then who your great-great-great-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-grandfather was and where he lived has no relevance to any claim to land today.
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Listen, God Almighty gave the Land of Canaan to the Jewish people. It says it right there in Genesis.

Who are you to argue with God? Do you think your views are more important then God's?

Do you really want to be hit by lightning?

:D
 
Didn't the Khazars convert to Judaism?
My understanding is that they contributed in a small fashion to the origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, but I am no expert and might be misrememebering
 
Simon39759 said:
Didn't the Khazars convert to Judaism?
My understanding is that they contributed in a small fashion to the origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, but I am no expert and might be misrememebering
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i read that only the royal family and a few thousand of the upper class converted...but the every day Khazar did not.

though, keep in mind, the German word for heretic is "Ketzer".

The theory that the majority of Ashkenazic Jews are the descendants of the non-Semitic converted Khazars was advocated by various racial theorists[15][16] and antisemitic sources[16][17][18][19] in the 20th century, especially following the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe. Despite recent genetic evidence to the contrary,[20] and a lack of any real mainstream scholarly support, this belief is still popular among groups such as the Christian Identity Movement, Black Hebrews, British Israelitists and others (particularly Arabs[21][22][23]) who claim that they, rather than Jews, are the true descendants of the Israelites, or who seek to usurp the connection between Ashkenazi Jews and Israel in favor of their own.
 
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Simon39759 said:
Didn't the Khazars convert to Judaism?
My understanding is that they contributed in a small fashion to the origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, but I am no expert and might be misrememebering
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It is not clear how many converted, and then it is not clear how many remained Jewish when the Khazar kingdom fell. There is not enough evidence.

The evidence I brought points out that Ashkenazi Jews are closer to other Jews than to other population. That does not exclude the possibility of some contribution from people of Khazar origin, as well as from intermarriage with non Jews/converts to Judaism.

IMO, it is possible that some Ashkenazi Jews have Khazar ancestry, but they would be a small minority of the community. Perhaps some researcher would find a genetic marker which would allow to study this question. It will be something like this:
The population geneticist Nathaniel Michael Pearson worked with the Human Genome Project a few years ago and helped to collect DNA samples from North Caucasians, Turks, Sino-Tibetans, and other groups. Pearson is of Ukrainian Jewish background and compared his paternal Y-chromosome sample to those of men from other groups. His DNA matched with an Uzbekistani Uzbek, an Uzbekistani Tajik, and two men from New Delhi in northern India. Pearson believes that the Central Asian haplotype he has could be connected to the Khazar Turks. However, he told me that this haplotype "appears at only a couple percent frequency in a large Ashkenazi sample (and strangely shows a slightly higher, but still very low, frequency among Moroccan Jews)". In other words, this particular possibly-Khazar ancestral strain represents a minority rather than a majority of Eastern European Jews. And while maternal DNA (mtDNA) studies have shown substantial links between Ashkenazi Jews and the peoples of Europe, these non-Israelite inputs into the Ashkenazi genepool still do not represent the majority of total maternal and paternal Ashkenazi ancestry, and probably only some of these European inputs come from Khazar women.
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(Though it seems to me that the connection above to Khazars is very tenuous. People move, and it is unclear that Pearsons ancestors did not move to the Ukraine at a later time, etc.)

Until better evidence presents itself, all that is left is just speculation.
 
"And while maternal DNA (mtDNA) studies have shown substantial links between Ashkenazi Jews and the peoples of Europe, these non-Israelite inputs into the Ashkenazi genepool still do not represent the majority of total maternal and paternal Ashkenazi ancestry, and probably only some of these European inputs come from Khazar women."

does this mean that there is a higher frequency of non-Jewish women in the Ashkenazi bloodline then non-Jewish men?

I would have thought it to be the opposite. The whole reason Jews are descended from the mother and NOT the father, was due to all the rapes that were going on. that suggests to me that if Judaism was passed on by the father (as it was throughout all of the Bible) there would have been a significant decrease in the Jewish population.
 
parky76 said:
"And while maternal DNA (mtDNA) studies have shown substantial links between Ashkenazi Jews and the peoples of Europe, these non-Israelite inputs into the Ashkenazi genepool still do not represent the majority of total maternal and paternal Ashkenazi ancestry, and probably only some of these European inputs come from Khazar women."

does this mean that there is a higher frequency of non-Jewish women in the Ashkenazi bloodline then non-Jewish men?

I would have thought it to be the opposite. The whole reason Jews are descended from the mother and NOT the father, was due to all the rapes that were going on. that suggests to me that if Judaism was passed on by the father (as it was throughout all of the Bible) there would have been a significant decrease in the Jewish population.
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IIRC, the matrilineal tradition dates back to around 1000 CE. The explanation I remember reading somewhere of the above is that the first Ashkenazi settlements in Western Europe were predominantly male and the males indeed married indigenous women.
 
Could it be the culture being less forceful on the guy? And so the prejudice against marrying out being less severe?
 
ddt said:
IIRC, the matrilineal tradition dates back to around 1000 CE. The explanation I remember reading somewhere of the above is that the first Ashkenazi settlements in Western Europe were predominantly male and the males indeed married indigenous women.
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id love to see an article about that. please search for it if you can.
 
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