---
title: "Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry"
chunk: 7/8
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"
---

Maurice Fishberg and Roland B. Dixon's works were later exploited in racist and religious polemical literature by advocates of British Israelism in the United States. Particularly after the publication of Burton J. Hendrick's The Jews in America (1923)           Singerman 2004, pp. 4–5 it began to enjoy a vogue among advocates of immigration restrictions in the 1920s; racial theorists like Lothrop Stoddard; antisemitic conspiracy theorists such as the Ku Klux Klan's Hiram Wesley Evans; and anti-communist polemicists such as John O. Beaty.
In 1938, Ezra Pound, then strongly identifying with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, sent a query to fellow poet Louis Zukofsky concerning the Khazars after someone had written to him claiming that the ancient Jews had died out and that modern Jews were of Khazar descent. He returned to the issue in 1955, apparently influenced by a book called Facts Are Facts, which pushed the Jewish-Khazar descent theory, and which for Pound had dug up "a few savoury morsels". The booklet in question, by a Roman Catholic convert from Rabbinic Judaism, Benjamin H. Freedman, was an antisemitic tirade written to David Goldstein after the latter had converted to Catholicism.
John O. Beaty was an antisemitic, McCarthyite professor of Old English at SMU, author of The Iron Curtain over America (Dallas 1952). According to him, "the Khazar Jews were responsible for all of America's – and the world's ills," beginning with World War I. The book had little impact until the former Wall Street broker and oil tycoon J. Russell Maguire promoted it. A similar position was adopted by Wilmot Robertson, whose views influenced David Duke. British novelist Douglas Reed has also been influential. In his works, the Ashkenazi are false Jews, descendants of the Khazars.
A number of different variants of the theory came to be exploited by the Christian Identity movement. The Christian Identity movement, which took shape from the 1940s to the 1970s, had its roots in British Israelism which had been planted on American evangelical soil in the late 19th century. By the 1960s the Khazar ancestry theory was an article of faith in the Christian Identity movement. The Christian Identity movement has associated two verses from the New Testament, Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 with the Khazars. Jeffrey Kaplan calls these two passages the cornerstone of Identity theology. He also reports that Christian Identity literature makes selective references to the Babylonian Talmud, while the works of Francis Parker Yockey and Arthur Koestler work are raised almost to the status of Holy Writ.
The idea has also been promoted by contemporary antisemitic groups on social media, according to the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. In the United States, extremist sects of Black Hebrew Israelites have promoted the antisemitic Khazar conspiracy theory about Jewish origins. These groups believe that Jewish people are "imposters" and that African Americans (sometimes Native and Latin Americans also) are the true descendants of the Israelites.

=== Soviet Union and Russia ===
The theory was prominent in Soviet antisemitism, gaining a place in Soviet historiography. The theory influenced Soviet historians including Boris Rybakov, Mikhail Artamonov and Lev Gumilyov and was used to support soviet political theory. Artamonov argued that the Khazars had played an important role in the development of Rus'. Rybakov disputed this view, instead regarding the Khazar state as parasitic. Official Soviet views on the Khazars hardened after December 1951 when Pravda published a critical review of Artamonov's work under the pen name P. Ivanov. Rybakov for his part denied that he was Ivanov. (Sand has speculated that Ivanov was in fact Stalin.) According to Sand, in Ivanov's review the Khazars were regarded as parasites and enemies. Ivanov's views became the certified Soviet position.
Lev Gumilyov's theory of ethnogenesis draws heavily on the Khazars theory. For Gumilyov ethnicity was defined by stereotypical behavior which was linked to adaption to the terrain. He regarded Jews as a parasitic, international urban class. The Jews had dominated the Khazars creating a chimera, subjecting Rus' to the "Khazar Yoke".
Since the 1970s the term Khazars has entered the Russian nationalist lexicon, being used as a euphemism for Jews. Vadim V. Kozhinov theorized that the Khazar Yoke was more dangerous to Rus´ than the Tatar Yoke. The Khazars were imagined as a persistent danger to Rus'. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the theory maintained a role in Russian antisemitism. Contemporary Russian antisemites continue to perpetuate the Khazar myth. Gumilyov's and his students' works remain popular in Russia. "Khazars" and "ethnic chimera" have become preferred terms for antisemitic Russian chauvinists.