Он үшінші тайпа: Хазарлар және Ашкеназ тарихы

1976 book by Arthur Koestler

The Thirteenth Tribe is a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler advocating the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people. Koestler hypothesized that the Khazars (who converted to Judaism in the 8th century) migrated westwards into Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries when the Khazar Empire was collapsing. Koestler used previous works by Douglas Morton Dunlop, Raphael Patai and Abraham Polak as sources. His stated intent was to make antisemitism disappear by disproving its racial basis. Popular reviews of the book were mixed, academic critiques of its research were generally negative, and Koestler biographers David Cesarani and Michael Scammell panned it. In 2018, the New York Times described the book as "widely discredited." Neither was it effective in disproving antisemitism, as antisemites merely adapted it — like prior work on the hypothesis — to argue the illegitimacy of present day Jews.

Koestler advances the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people originating in and populating an empire north of and between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. Koestler's hypothesis is that the Khazars – who converted to Judaism in the 8th century – migrated westwards into current Eastern Europe (primarily Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Hungary and Germany) in the 12th and 13th centuries when the Khazar Empire was collapsing. At the end of the book's last chapter, Koestler summarizes its content and his intentions as follows: "In Part One of this book I have attempted to trace the history of the Khazar Empire based on the scant existing sources. In Part Two, Chapters V VII, I have compiled the historical evidence which indicates that the bulk of Eastern Jewry — and hence of world Jewry — is of Khazar Turkish, rather than Semitic, origin. In the last chapter I have tried to show that the evidence from anthropology concurs with history in refuting the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe."

Koestler biographer Michael Scammell writes that Koestler told French biologist Pierre Debray Ritzen he "was convinced that if he could prove that the bulk of Eastern European Jews (the ancestors of today's Ashkenazim) were descended from the Khazars, the racial basis for anti Semitism would be removed and anti Semitism itself could disappear". According to George Urban, Koestler's desire to connect Ashkenazi Jews with Khazars was "based on a tacit belief that the intellectual brilliance of and international influence of Hungarians and Jews, especially Hungarian Jews or Jewish Hungarians, was due to some unexplained but clearly ancient affinity between the two peoples".

In The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand, historian of cinema, French intellectual history, and nationalism at Tel Aviv University, writes "while the Khazars scared off the Israeli historians, not one of whom has published a single paper on the subject, Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe annoyed and provoked angry responses. Hebrew readers had no access to the book itself for many years, learning about it only through the venomous denunciations". Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education editor Evan Goldstein states "Sand suggests that those who attacked Koestler's book did so not because it lacked merit, but because the critics were cowards and ideologues. 'No one wants to go looking under stones when venomous scorpions might be lurking beneath them, waiting to attack the self image of the existing ethnos and its territorial ambitions.'" In the Arab world the theory espoused in Koestler's book was adopted by persons who argued that if Ashkenazi Jews are primarily Khazar and not Semitic in origin, they would have no historical claim to Israel, nor would they be the subject of the Biblical promise of Canaan to the Israelites, thus undermining the theological basis of both Jewish religious Zionists and Christian Zionists. The Saudi Arabian delegate to the United Nations argued that Koestler's theory "negated Israel's right to exist". Koestler did not see alleged Khazar ancestry as diminishing the claim of Jews to Israel, which he felt was based on the United Nations mandate and not on Biblical covenants or genetic inheritance. In his view, "[t]he problem of the Khazar infusion a thousand years ago is irrelevant to modern Israel." According to Jeffrey Kaplan, The Thirteenth Tribe was "Identity's primary source for the Khazar theory"; they felt Koestler's book confirmed their own beliefs regarding Jews, and sold it "through their mail order services". Michael Barkun writes that Koestler was apparently "either unaware of or oblivious to the use anti Semites had made of the Khazar theory since its introduction at the turn of the century." Reviewing the work in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 1991, journalist and author Grace Halsell described it as a "carefully researched book" that "refutes the idea of a Jewish 'race'." Despite some positive reviews in the press, James A. Beverley writes "When The Thirteenth Tribe was released, the academic critique of its research was prompt, public, and generally negative", and Evan Goldstein states that it was "savaged by critics". A November 1976 review in National Review stated that the work had "neither the value of a well executed honest piece of scholarship nor the emotional appeal of a polemic – only the earmarks of a poorly researched and hastily written book". Koestler's analysis was described as a mixture of flawed etymologies and misinterpreted primary sources by Chimen Abramsky in 1976 and Hyam Maccoby in 1977. Barkun describes the book as an "eccentric work", and writes that Koestler was "unequipped with the specialist background the subject might be thought to require", but that he "nevertheless made an amateur's serious attempt to investigate and support the theory."

A 2005 study by Nebel et al., based on Y chromosome polymorphic markers, showed that Ashkenazi Jews are more closely related to other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than to the populations among whom they lived in Europe. However, 11.5% of male Ashkenazim were found to belong to Haplogroup R1a, the dominant Y chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europeans, suggesting possible gene flow. Referencing The Thirteenth Tribe, the study's authors note that "Some authors argue that after the fall of their kingdom in the second half of the 10th century CE, the Khazar converts were absorbed by the emerging Ashkenazi Jewish community in Eastern Europe." They conclude: "However, if the R M17 chromosomes in Ashkenazi Jews do indeed represent the vestiges of the mysterious Khazars then, according to our data, this contribution was limited to either a single founder or a few closely related men, and does not exceed ~ 12% of the present day Ashkenazim". Subsequent research showed that Ashkenazi varieties of R1a cannot have been Khazar in origin, with their Levite branch R1a Y2619 within R1a M582 being of Middle Eastern origin and their non Levite haplogroup R1a M12402 having close Slavic matches but a distance from Turkic matches. A 2013 study by Costa et al. included The Thirteenth Tribe in its list of references and attempted to test its Khazar hypothesis genetically. It concluded that "almost none" of the Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups originated in the North Caucasus or Chuvashia, which it viewed as invalidating Koestler's hypothesis, This study listed the Ashkenazi mtDNA haplogroup it called N9a among lineages called "Others" with roots in Asia and the Near East. According to them, either N9a or N1c is an example of an Asian haplogroup since the other haplogroup in their "Others" column, K1a4, is stated to be Near Eastern. The "Asian haplogroup N lineages" that the study identified in non Jewish North Caucasian populations differed from all Ashkenazi branches of N. A 2007 study noted that N9a "has a great diversity in the whole of China and Korea." A 2015 study framed N9a as illustrative of a wider pattern of genetic connections "between Jews and Chinese." Two 2022 studies shed light on the Ashkenazi subclade, now called N9a3a1b1, showing it to be directly descended from a lineage found in Turkic and Mongolic peoples, set within the cluster N9a3a1 found in the North Caucasus and East Asia, and therefore potentially of Khazar origin. Writing in Science, Michael Balter states Koestler's thesis "clash[es] with several recent studies suggesting that Jewishness, including the Ashkenazi version, has deep genetic roots." He refers to a 2010 study by geneticist Harry Ostrer which found that Ashkenazi Jews "clustered more closely with Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jews, a finding the researchers say is inconsistent with the Khazar hypothesis" and concludes "that all three Jewish groups—Middle Eastern, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi—share genomewide genetic markers that distinguish them from other worldwide populations". Geneticist Noah Rosenberg asserts that although recent DNA studies "do not appear to support" the Khazar hypothesis, they do not "entirely eliminate it either."