Human Diversity

Geneticists Dispute Latest “Jewish Khazar” Theory

khazmap9One of the world’s leading geneticists, University of California-based Razib Khan, who runs the Gene Expression website of Discover magazine, has disputed the latest genetic report doing the rounds which claims eastern European Jews are descended from the Khazars, a hotchpotch of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries AD and, influenced by Jews from Palestine, converted to Judaism in the 8th century.

This “Khazar” theory has been popular ever since the appearance of Arthur Koestler’s book “The Thirteenth Tribe” and has often featured in Jewish historical narratives as well.

The new report, now being widely circulated in Jewish news sources such as Ynet, was done by Jewish geneticist Eran Elhaik of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and published in the British journal Genome Biology and Evolution.

In this report, now being claimed as final proof of the Khazar theory, Elhaik claims to have found genetic proof that among Ashkenazim Jews, ancestral signatures point to the Caucasus and also, but to a smaller degree, the Middle East.

The report contradicts two earlier studies in 2012 by Harry Ostrer, a professor of genetics here at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which found that geographically and culturally distant Jews still have more genes in common than they do with non-Jews around them, and that those genes can be traced back to the Levant, an area including modern-day Israel.

Kahn has subjected Elhaik’s new study to a critical analysis in an article titled “Ashkenazi Jews are probably not descended from the Khazars” in the Gene Expression site.

Khan points out a number of serious problems with Elhaik’s study, most notably that the “Caucasian component that is being detected in this paper may simply be an indigenous Middle Eastern ancestral element which has now been somewhat displaced northward in its modal frequency due to the expansion of the Arabs.”

In the fast-changing world of genetics, it has now become common for scientists to issue contradictory reports on the topic, and, at the end of the day, what really matters is how the Jewish Supremacists behave—and how this behavior has been a constant throughout history.

From the very earliest times, Jewish Supremacists have come into conflict with their neighbors, going back to the Romans.

Jews were expelled from Carthage in 250 AD, Alexandria in 415 AD, France in 554 AD, Spain in 612 AD, Italy in 855 AD, Germany several times starting in 1012 AD in Mainz, from France again in 1182 AD, England in 1290 AD, Switzerland in 1348 AD, Hungary in 1349 AD, Belgium in 1370 AD,  Austria in 1421 AD, the Netherlands in 1442 AD, Spain in 1492 D and so on, right through to Russia and Poland in the 1600s through to the mid-1800s.

In 1862, Jews were even expelled from parts of America under the U.S. under General Grant’s Jurisdiction during the Civil War.

The point of this is to show that there has been a consistent behavioral pattern at work going right back to Roman times, which argues strongly against the Khazar theory, which suggests a genetic break between the Jews of ancient Levant and modern Jews.

In other words, the disruptive and conflict-ridden behavior which has marked out Jewish Supremacist activities through the millennia, strongly suggests that Jews have remained more or less genetically uniform and have, as Dr. Kevin MacDonald has pointed out, developed a group evolutionary survival strategy based on a common biological unity—something which strongly militates against the Khazar theory.