Israel Hayom..
28 December '12..
Every number of years the theory is advanced that the Jews of Europe are actually descendants of the Khazar kingdom, a mostly Turkic people whose king and nobility converted to Judaism in the early eighth century, allowing them to become a buffer state between Islam and Christendom.
When the Khazar kingdom collapsed in the 13th century, according to the believers in the Khazar theory, its population fled into Eastern Europe and served as the core of European Jewry. Most Jewish historians argued for centuries that after the destruction of the Temple and the Bar Kokhba Revolt, many Jews who had been exiled moved up the Italian peninsula north of the Alps into the trading cities along the Rhine River in Germany. From there, European Jewry began to populate the countries of Eastern Europe in the centuries that followed.
In his monumental work, "Arab Attitudes to Israel," written in the early 1970s, Professor Yehoshafat Harkabi described the Khazar theory as one of the arguments marshaled in the Arab world to assert that the Jews of the modern period were not the descendents of the biblical of children of Israel and hence had no historical right to recover their land. This position is also voiced in the Palestinian media today.
For example, Jarir al-Qidwa, who was an educational adviser to Yasser Arafat and later chairman of the Palestinian Authority Public Library, appeared on PA television on August 2, 2004 and explained that the original Jews of the biblical period were dispersed among the nations and that it was the "Khazar Jews who live in Palestine today." Prominent voices within the Muslim Brotherhood have also advanced the idea that modern Jews are descendants of the Khazars, as well.
The Khazar theory was strange. If only a small number of Khazars in the court of their king converted to Judaism, then how could they become the basis for the masses of European Jewry? Arab historians in the 10th century reported that most of the Khazars were Muslims, in any case. Moreover, if the Khazars, whose language was close to Turkish, were the source for European Jews, then why did Yiddish evolve as a European Jewish language that was linguistically close to German and Hebrew, but not to Turkish or any other Central Asian language?
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