Review of The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur KoestlerBy Grace Halsell
This review first appeared in The Washington Report For
Middle East Affairs, June 1991
"A check at the Library of Congress reveals that the most prestigious
library of our land had one reading copy. That one copy, however, is
'missing from the shelf' " .
Since 1948, when Zionists succeeded in carving out a Jewish state from the
land of the Palestinians, the question "who is a Jew" has been endlessly
debated. Zionists (both Christian and Jewish) often declare that "God gave the
land" of Palestine "to the Jews." They infer that God deeded territories, in
perpetuity, to a biblical tribe of Oriental Middle Eastern people. Since
millions of American Christians accept a dogma that God has a Chosen Land and a
Chosen People (the Jews), then the question "who is a Jew?" takes on political
connotations that impinge on national and international decisions.
In his carefully researched book entitled The Thirteenth Tribe, Arthur
Koestler refutes the idea of a Jewish "race." Moreover, he says that most Jews
of the contemporary world did not come from Palestine and are not even of
Semitic origin. His research shows that most Jews originated in what today is
the Soviet Union. And that a group of people there became Jews through
conversion, on the orders of their king. "The bulk of modern Jewry is not of
Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin," Koestler writes. "Their ancestors came
not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus."
And he stresses:
"The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean
across France and Germany to the east and then back again. The stream moved
in a consistently western direction, from the Caucasus, from the Ukraine
into Poland and thence into Central Europe."
While Jews of different origin also contributed to the existing Jewish world
community, "the main bulk originated from the Khazar country" in the USSR.
Koestler, a Jew born in 1905 in Budapest, writes that the Khazars, who
flourished from the 7th to the 11th century, were a major power. Their empire
extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian and from the Caucasus to the Volga.
They were located "between two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in
Byzantium and the triumphant followers of Muhammad." Since the world was
polarized between these two superpowers representing Christianity and Islam, the
Khazar Empire, representing a Third Force,
"Could only maintain its independence by accepting neither Christianity
nor Islam - for either choice would have automatically subordinated it to
the authority of the Roman Emperor or the Caliph of Baghdad."
Not wishing to be dominated by either of the two, the Khazar king "embraced
the Jewish faith" in AD 740 and ordered his subjects to do the same. Judaism
thus became the state religion of the Khazars. The king's motives in adopting
Judaism, Koestler stresses, were purely political. At the peak of its power,
from the seventh to the tenth centuries AD, the Khazar kingdom controlled or
exacted tribute from some 30 different nations and tribes inhabiting the vast
territories between the Caucasus , the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, the town of
Kiev and the Ukrainian steppes. People under Khazar suzerainty included the
Bulgars, Burtas, Ghuzz, Magyars (Hungarians), the Gothic and Greek colonies of
the Crimea, and the Slavonic tribes in the northwestern woodland.
According to The Jewish Encyclopedia, in the 16th century Jews
numbered about one million. Koestler quotes scholars as documenting that "the
majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars." Koestler, who
after the Second World War became a British citizen, and whose most famous book,
Darkness at Noon, was translated into 33 languages, has one main thesis:
the bulk of Eastern Jewry -and hence of world Jewry is of Khazar-Turkish, rather
than Semitic, origin.
As Koestier points out, Jews of our times fall into two main divisions:
Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The Sephardi, descendants of the Jews who had lived in
Spain until their expulsion, with the Muslims, at the end of the 15th century,
and who later settled in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, spoke a
Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino. In the 1960s, the Sephardim numbered about
500,000. The Ashkenazim, at the same period, were about 11 million. Thus, "in
common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew."
However, Koestler adds, the term Ashkenazim is misleading because it is
generally applied to Germany, thus contributing to the legend that modem Jewry
originated on the Rhine. There is, however, no other term to refer to the
non-Sephardic majority of contemporary Jewry,which came after conversion to
Judaism from the Khazar country. After the destruction of their empire (in the
12th or 13th century), the Jewish Khazars migrated into those regions of Eastern
Europe, mainly Russia and Poland, where, at the dawn of the modem age, the
greatest concentrations of Jews were found. It is "well documented," Koestler
writes, that the numerically and socially dominant element in the Jewish
population of Hungary during the Middle Ages was of Khazar origin.
An Israeli scholar, A.N. Poliak, a Tel Aviv University professor of medieval
Jewish history, quoted by Koestler, states that the descendants of Khazar Jews,
"those who stayed where they were (in Khazaria), those who emigrated to
the United States and to other countries, and those who went to Israel -
constitute now the large majority of world Jewry."
Since Israel's support among millions of American Christians is founded on a
concept that God had bequeathed territory to a biblical "tribe" of Oriental
Middle Eastern Jews, it becomes ironic to learn from Koestler's research that
most Jews today are not descended from natives of the "holy land," or even of
the Middle East. Koestler, who originally published The Thirteenth Tribe
in 1976, noted that the story of the Khazar empire "begins to look like the most
cruel hoax history has ever perpetrated." The Palestinians, imprisoned and
brutalized by Zionism's "hoax," would be the first to agree. Needless to say,
the book has been difficult to find. It disappears from many library shelves. A
check at the Library of Congress reveals that the most prestigious library of
our land had one reading copy. That one copy, however, is "missing from the
shelf.
Grace Halsell is a journalist based in Washington, DC, USA, and the author of
more than 10 books.
© The Washington Report For Middle East Affairs, 1991
