---
title: "Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry"
chunk: 4/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:17:58.212648+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== 1976–present: Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe and contemporary views ===
The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication in 1976 of Arthur Koestler's book The Thirteenth Tribe, which made sweeping claims for a Khazar legacy among the Ashkenazi, and asserted that the Jewish population in Eastern Europe could not have reached 8 million without the contribution of the Khazars. Koestler argued that the Khazar theory would mitigate European racially-based antisemitism.
The book received both positive and negative reviews. Israel's ambassador to Britain branded it "an anti-Semitic action financed by the Palestinians", while Bernard Lewis claimed that the idea was not supported by any evidence whatsoever, and had been "abandoned by all serious scholars". 
Raphael Patai, however, registered some support for the idea that Khazar remnants had played a role in the growth of Eastern European Jewish communities, and several amateur researchers, such as Boris Altschüler (1994) and Kevin Alan Brook, kept the thesis in the public eye. Brook's views evolved as new data became available: in the first edition of his book (1999), he contended that about one-fourth of Ashkenazic ancestry may trace back to the Khazars, whereas in the second edition (2006) he regarded the Khazar contribution as "small" and in the third edition (2018) he argued against any Khazar contribution.
In 2007, Peter Golden suggested that at least some of the Ashkenazi Jews of Hungary in particular (along with some Hungarians) might have inherited a minority of their ancestry from Khazar remnants that migrated west.
The theory has been used in challenges to concepts of Jewish peoplehood. It has been revived recently in a variety of approaches, from linguistics (Paul Wexler) to historiography (Shlomo Sand in his 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish People) and population genetics (Eran Elhaik). In broad academic perspective, both the idea that the Khazars converted en masse to Judaism, and the suggestion that they emigrated to form the core population of Ashkenazi Jewry, remain highly polemical issues.
Writing in 2011, Simon Schama in his The Story of the Jews, endorsed the traditional narrative of a Khazar conversion under kings of distant Jewish descent who initiated judaising reforms among the population. In June 2014, Shaul Stampfer published a paper challenging the Khazar hypothesis as ungrounded in sources contemporary with the Khazar period, stating: "Such a conversion, even though it's a wonderful story, never happened".

== Genetics and the Khazar theory ==

Before modern DNA population genetics entered the field, Raphael Patai described the Khazars in racial terms as being a Turkic people with some Mongoloid admixture. After major advances in DNA sequence analysis and computing technology in the late 20th and early 21st century, a plethora of genetic research on Jewish and other human populations has been conducted worldwide. Summing up the results in 2015, the Yiddish scholar Alexander Beider stated that genetic studies often resulted in contradictory outcomes, complicated at times by the political or religious views of some researchers.
In 2000, science journalist Nicholas Wade interpreted a genetics paper on Ashkenazi Y-chromosome lineages as refuting theories that the Ashkenazi were descendants of converts generally or of the Khazars specifically.
The following year, in 2001, Almut Nebel et al., summarizing studies that reported a low-level European gene flow contributing to Ashkenazi paternal gene pool, suggested this influence might be reflected in the Eu 19 chromosomes common in Eastern Europe, or otherwise, that Ashkenazim with this component might descend from Khazars, an hypothesis the authors found "attractive".
In 2008, in a book entitled Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History , David Goldstein stated that despite his initial skepticism regarding Koestler's thesis, the certainty underlying his dismissal had been undermined when he considered that a hypothetical Khazar connection struck him as no more far-fetched than what had emerged in genetics concerning the apparent 'spectacular continuity of the Cohen line' or the discovery of what seemed to be Jewish genetic signatures among the Bantu Lemba. In his view, the idea had a degree of plausibility, if not likely.
In 2013 Martin B. Richards stated that presently available genetic studies shows that 50-80 percent of Ashkenazi Y chromosome DNA could be traced to the Near East, while his own study at the University of Huddersfield found that 80 percent of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA could be traced to Europe, but with virtually no lineages from the North Caucasus. This implied a trend of European women marrying Near Eastern men, but provided no evidence to support the Khazar hypothesis. The claim that Ashkenazis as a whole take their origin from Khazars has been widely criticized as there is no direct evidence to support it. Using four Jewish groups, one being Ashkenazi, Kopelman et al found no evidence for the Khazar theory.
While the consensus in genetic research is that the world's Jewish populations (including the Ashkenazim) share substantial genetic ancestry derived from a common Ancient Middle Eastern founder population, and that Ashkenazi Jews have no genetic ancestry attributable to Khazars.
Some evidence suggests a close relationship of Jewish patrilineages (including those of the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Iraqi and Moroccan Jews) with those of the Samaritans, with some lineages sharing a common ancestry projected to the time of the Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel.