Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry

The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, often called the Khazar myth by its critics,^[1][2] is a largely abandoned historical hypothesis that postulated that Ashkenazi Jews were primarily, or to a large extent, descended from Khazars, a multi-ethnic conglomerate of mostly Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic khanate in and around the northern and central Caucasus and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. The hypothesis also postulated that after collapse of the Khazar empire, the Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and made up a large part of the Jews there.^[3] The hypothesis draws on medieval sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which at some point in the 8th–9th centuries, a small number of Khazars were said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism.^[4] The scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain, but the evidence used to tie the subsequent Ashkenazi communities to the Khazars is meager and subject to conflicting interpretations.^[5]

Speculation that Europe's Jewish population originated among the Khazars has persisted for two centuries, from at least as early as 1808. In the late 19th century, Ernest Renan and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe originated among refugees who had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into Europe. Though intermittently evoked by several scholars since that time, the Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976.^[6][3] It has been revived recently by geneticist Eran Elhaik, who in 2013 conducted a study aiming to vindicate it.^[7]

Genetic studies on Jews have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews. Geneticists such as Doron Behar and others (2013) have concluded that such a link is unlikely, noting that it is difficult to test the Khazar hypothesis using genetics because there is lack of clear modern descendants of the Khazars that could provide a clear test of the contribution to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, but found no genetic markers in Ashkenazi Jews that would link them to peoples of the Caucasus/Khazar area.^[8] Atzmon and others found evidence that the Ashkenazi have mixed Near Eastern and Southern European/Mediterranean origins, though some admixture with Khazar and Slavic populations after 100 CE was not excluded.^[a][8] Xue and others note a wholly Khazar/Turkish/Middle eastern origin is out of the question, given the complexity of Ashkenazi admixtures.^[b] Although the majority of contemporary geneticists who have published on the topic dismiss it, there are some who have defended its plausibility, or not excluded the possibility of some Khazar component in the formation of the Ashkenazi.

The hypothesis has been cited at times by anti-Zionists to challenge the idea that Jews have genetic ties to ancient Israel. It has also occasionally played some role in antisemitic theories propounded by fringe groups of American racists, Russian nationalists and adherents of the Christian identity movement.

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