the problem of evidence is for the Khazar hypothesis, there’s a handful of letters & coins showing the Khazar leaders practicised judaism, to what extent the whole state or people did is speculation. then it’s speculation and entirely undocumented how these “khazars” got so far west of where the khazar state had been, yet did not leave a much of a trace in the caucauses.
and then why did jews in eastern europe speak yiddish? that just has to be ignored or chalked up to… cultural imperialism? on the part of later migrants.
genetics are a) useless for determining anything but the most generalized impressions of migrations that have happened b) no “khazars” or descendant groups exist to test against. c) to the extent they’ve tested, it doesn’t support the theory
you’re right in that the theory has been used in various ways, both to try to create the impression of jewish indigeneity to russia (from russian jews), also to deny ashkenazi indigeneity to palestine (anti-zionism)—but it makes lots of people uncomfortable because after being mostly run out of academia for the above reasons, the people left talking about it are mostly antisemitic cranks making the case ashkenazi were ‘turkish’ interlopers in europe.
it doesn’t matter where the people doing apartheid in Palestine “actually” came from though, the problem is they’re doing apartheid. if groups of european jews had just moved to palestine like normal immigrants and not taken over and stolen everything, no-one would care if they believed their mythic ancestors were from there, right?
I see what you mean. Most of my exposure to the hypothesis (other than the aforementioned Zionist tropes) is from Cold War era non-Zionist Jewish sources, and they really didn’t deal too much with the Yiddish thing. I believe the idea of the constant movement of peoples, in those tellings, explained why they ended up north and west of Khazar land for the same reason the Magyars and others ended ups in similar places. The main up-shot of those sources, at least in my reading, kind of goes to your final point, but in a different way. The idea being that the peoples in the Steppe were always a fluid amalgam of people and there were home-grown Jewish influences there that became a cultural seed that developed in groups in the area that sought to neither ally with the Christian world to the west and what was developing into the Persian/other empires and Muslim world to the east. So that reading of it goes that essentially no one has mythic ancestors in any one place because the version of history during any time period where one would posit a homogenous genetic group stayed “pure” from others is, at least with respect to Eurasian and African history, false. As those writers point out from the genetic (albeit, genetics as they existed a few decades ago) perspective, Jews generally are more genetically similar to the populations they live with than Jews from disparate places have genetic commonality with each other. I definitely agree none of this matters with respect to the current genocide of the Palestinians, but the modern politics overshadow the almost mundane aspect that I am more curious about regarding the movement and interactions of peoples from Eastern Europe to Central Asia prior to and after the Rus came into the picture.
the problem of evidence is for the Khazar hypothesis, there’s a handful of letters & coins showing the Khazar leaders practicised judaism, to what extent the whole state or people did is speculation. then it’s speculation and entirely undocumented how these “khazars” got so far west of where the khazar state had been, yet did not leave a much of a trace in the caucauses.
and then why did jews in eastern europe speak yiddish? that just has to be ignored or chalked up to… cultural imperialism? on the part of later migrants.
genetics are a) useless for determining anything but the most generalized impressions of migrations that have happened b) no “khazars” or descendant groups exist to test against. c) to the extent they’ve tested, it doesn’t support the theory
you’re right in that the theory has been used in various ways, both to try to create the impression of jewish indigeneity to russia (from russian jews), also to deny ashkenazi indigeneity to palestine (anti-zionism)—but it makes lots of people uncomfortable because after being mostly run out of academia for the above reasons, the people left talking about it are mostly antisemitic cranks making the case ashkenazi were ‘turkish’ interlopers in europe.
it doesn’t matter where the people doing apartheid in Palestine “actually” came from though, the problem is they’re doing apartheid. if groups of european jews had just moved to palestine like normal immigrants and not taken over and stolen everything, no-one would care if they believed their mythic ancestors were from there, right?
I see what you mean. Most of my exposure to the hypothesis (other than the aforementioned Zionist tropes) is from Cold War era non-Zionist Jewish sources, and they really didn’t deal too much with the Yiddish thing. I believe the idea of the constant movement of peoples, in those tellings, explained why they ended up north and west of Khazar land for the same reason the Magyars and others ended ups in similar places. The main up-shot of those sources, at least in my reading, kind of goes to your final point, but in a different way. The idea being that the peoples in the Steppe were always a fluid amalgam of people and there were home-grown Jewish influences there that became a cultural seed that developed in groups in the area that sought to neither ally with the Christian world to the west and what was developing into the Persian/other empires and Muslim world to the east. So that reading of it goes that essentially no one has mythic ancestors in any one place because the version of history during any time period where one would posit a homogenous genetic group stayed “pure” from others is, at least with respect to Eurasian and African history, false. As those writers point out from the genetic (albeit, genetics as they existed a few decades ago) perspective, Jews generally are more genetically similar to the populations they live with than Jews from disparate places have genetic commonality with each other. I definitely agree none of this matters with respect to the current genocide of the Palestinians, but the modern politics overshadow the almost mundane aspect that I am more curious about regarding the movement and interactions of peoples from Eastern Europe to Central Asia prior to and after the Rus came into the picture.