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Title: Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler ISBN: 0-445-04242-7 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: June, 1978 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $2.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: AN anti-simitic text
Comment: THis book, which is often confused with a similarly titled work, is actually a polemic that aargues that Jews are not the descendants of King David and Abraham but are actually descendants of the Khazars, a tribe in the Causcusas that converted to Judaism in the 8th century. Two major problems abound. First, most Jews do actually share many Semitic(middle eastern) qualities in their features. Now the Khazars were Caucasian, which is to say they were very different looking then say Arabs, who are also Semitic. The Khazars disappeared in the wake of the Mongol invasions and few if any were ever able to travel to europe and mingle with their fellow Jews. The Khazars were a unique people but like most peoples of the Caucases they did not immigrate to anywhere, they simple stayed in their place, like the Chechens and Armenians and Georgians have also done despite invasion and persecution. So the hateful polemic that is said in this book, used to defame Judaism, is not credible and those interested in Khazaria should search for the actual Thirteenth Tribe book that was written by the author, not this text which is published by a Neo-Nazi organization.
Rating: 1
Summary: Does not stand up to modern scrutiny
Comment: The culture of the Khazars, a central asian tribe that adopted Judaism over 1000 years ago and was then destroyed by Gengis Khan, is a facinating subject worthy of study. Sadly, it always gets mixed up with an old 19th century idea that modern European Jews are decended from the Khazars and not the biblical Jews. That theory, highly popular in the middle 19th century served the duel use of, for some, proving that the Jews around Europe were not the same as those of the Hebrew Bible, giving great comfort to anti-semitic Christians. For others, they wanted to prove that Jesus was not Jewish, a strange branch of racist psudo-theory that goes on even today.
In the 19th century Jews could simply role their eyes but had no evidence to disprove the theory. The best evidence against the Khazar theory was lingustic, as neither Hebrew nor Yiddish seems to contain any trace of a cetral asian language. Now, with gentic evidence, we can positively identify common ancestry of Jews from areas as far flung as Germany, Spain, Yemen, and Russia. Identical Y chromosome markers can be found among members of every community. While it may be that some Khazars married into the larger Jewish community, the evidence indicates that it never happened in overwhelming number. Indeed, their is considerable historic evidence that the Khazar were largely cut off from the rest of the Jewish world.
Many reviwers point to the idea that many European Jews show non-middle eastern features (blue eyes, blond hair, etc.) However, the existance of large scale conversion to Judaism is a clear historical fact. Particularly before Christianity became firmly rooted in Eastern and South Eastern Europe, many locals converted to Judaism. Many of the modern Jewish attitudes against conversion are in fact reasonably recent, tracable to the strong and often violent action Christians took against communities where individuals chose to become Jews.
Given the vast amount of genetic evidence against the theory one has to wonder why it still gets so much play. After all, if all Jews contain common genetic markers from locations across the world, what possible evidence could be for this strange theory?
Rating: 5
Summary: Do the Ashkenazi Jews hail from the Middle East?
Comment: No they do not, as Mr. Koestler explains in this illuminating work. Koestler reveals from ancient sources that the Khazar Empire was converted to Judaism by Rabbis from Babylon in the 700's AD. The Khazar tribe was originally from Central Asia and had moved west by the first century BC. After the Khazar empire was dismantled in the middle ages, the Khazars moved west into Poland and Russia and there formed the famous Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Popular mythology says that these Jews came east, fleeing persecution in Western Europe, when they were from an ancient Turko-Finnish people. The Hebrew alphabet was adopted to the Khazar language which survives as Yiddish.
A letter from the Khazar king to a Jewish diplomat in Spain says that although the Khazars consider themselves Jews, they actually trace their decent to Ashkenaz, who was one of the sons of Japeth. Shem was Japeth's brother, and the Biblical Patriarchs (Abraham, Issac and Jacob) are traced to Shem, not Japeth. 90 percent of todays Jews are of Ashkenazi heritage, and since Ashkenaz was not a child of Shem, the term "anti-semetic" does not apply to them because they are not Semites. The Arabs of the Middle East are Semitic however, since they are descendant of Abraham's son Ishmael (Ishmaelites).
The most bizarre set of facts that Koestler reveals are about the figurehead monarch that the Khazars had as king. This king had only symbolic importance, and weilded little temporal power. However he was regarded as extremely important, much like the King in a Chess game. This king was also ritually sacrifced at the end of his reign.
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Title: THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE by Arthur Koestler ISBN: 0394402847 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 12 July, 1976 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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