---
title: "Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry"
chunk: 2/8
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"
---

This conversion of the kingdom of the Khazars has a considerable importance regarding the origin of those Jews who dwell in the countries along the Danube and southern Russia. These regions enclose great masses of Jewish populations which have in all probability nothing or almost nothing that is anthropologically Jewish in them.
According to Mari Réthelyi, a Jewish studies teacher writing in the journal Hungarian Cultural Studies, many Hungarian Jews in the late nineteenth century, responding to Magyarization and to Hungarian antisemitism, took up the theory, proposed by Rabbi Samuel Kohn in 1884, that Hungarian Jews, like Hungarian Christians, shared a common ethnic descent from the intermarriage of Khazars and Magyars.
Renan's thesis found an echo soon after, in 1885, when Isidore Loeb, a rabbi, historian and secretary of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, arguing for the cause of Jewish emancipation, challenged the notion that nations were based on races, and the Jews therefore, could be excluded as alien. To the contrary, he argued, they were no different from other peoples and nations, all of which arose from miscegenation: the Jews were no exception, and one could assume, he added, that many German and Russian Jews descended from the Khazars. Similarly, in 1893, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, a critic of antisemitism who drew on Renan, queried whether or not thousands of Polish and Russian Jews might have their origins traced back to the "old nomads of the steppes".
Other scholars, such as Joseph Jacobs (1886), expressed scepticism.
The Russian-Jewish physician and physical anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg (1867–1928), using physical measurements of 1,350 Jews in his home town of Elizavetgrad, challenged the idea that east European Jews originated, like German Jews, as migrants from medieval France. Jewish settlement in eastern Europe took place very early, and these rooted eastern communities readily accepted into their midst Khazars who had converted, absorbing many thousands into the Kievan empire. The theory implied Jewish culture predated the rise of Russia, an implication which led Stalin decades later to ban Khazar studies in the Soviet Union. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a pioneer of race science and physical anthropology, had argued earlier that the origins of the "European" race lay in the Caucasus. In this context, Weissenberg's formulation, in identifying Eastern Jews as descendants of an intermixture of Jews with the Caucasian Khazars, presented the eastern Jews, long thought inferior or less noble than Western Sephardic Jews, as the authentic, veritable heirs of a European Jewish tradition. In 1903, Maksymilian Ernest Gumplowicz (1864–1897), in his posthumous treatise entitled The beginnings of Jewish religion in Poland, examined traces of Khazar elements in early Polish history.
In 1909 Hugo von Kutschera developed the notion into a book-length study, arguing that Khazars formed the foundational core of the modern Ashkenazi. Maurice Fishberg introduced the notion to an American audience in 1911 in his book The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.
When at the Versailles Peace Conference, a Jewish Zionist called Palestine the land of the Jewish people's ancestors, Joseph Reinach, a French Jewish member of parliament who was opposed to Zionism, dismissed the idea, arguing that Jews descended from Israelites were a tiny minority. In his view, conversion had played a major role in the expansion of the Jewish people, and, in addition, he claimed, the majority of "Russian, Polish and Galician Jews descend from the Khazars, a Tatar people from the south of Russia who converted to Judaism en masse at the time of Charlemagne."

=== Interwar years, 1918–1939 ===
The idea was also taken up by the Polish-Jewish economic historian and General Zionist Yitzhak Schipper in 1918, by the Harvard anthropologist Roland B. Dixon (1923) and writer H. G. Wells (1921), who used it to argue that "The main part of Jewry never was in Judea", a thesis that was to have a political echo in later opinion. In 1931 Sigmund Freud wrote to Max Eitingon that the sculptor Oscar Nemon, for whom he was sitting, showed the lineaments of a "Slavic Eastern Jew, Khazar or Kalmuck or something like that".
In 1932, Samuel Krauss ventured the theory that the biblical Ashkenaz referred to northern Asia Minor, and he identified it with the Khazars, a position immediately disputed by Jacob Mann.
This interwar period consolidated also a belief, originally developed by the Russian Orientalists V. V. Grigor'iev and V. D. Smirnov, that the East European congregations of the Karaite sect of Judaism were descendants of Turkic Khazars. The idea of a Khazarian origin of the Karaites was then adopted as their official viewpoint. Seraja Szapszal (1873–1961), from 1927, the ḥakham of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaite community, had begun to implement a thorough-going reform policy of dejudaizing Karaite culture and traditions and transforming along Turkic lines. As a secular Jew and orientalist he was influenced by Atatürk's reforms, and his policy was dictated by several considerations: Jews were suffering from harassment in public and private in Eastern Europe; he wished to forestall the threat he had intuited was imminent in both Fascism and Nazism, which were beginning to gain a foothold; he was passionate about the Karaites' language, Karaim, and its Turkish tradition, and somewhat insouciant of the Judaic heritage of his people. In 1934 Corrado Gini, a distinguished statistician, interested also in demography and anthropology, with close ties to the fascist elite, led an expedition in August–October 1934 to survey the Karaites. He concluded that Karaites were ethnically mixed, predominantly Chuvash, which he mistook to be Finno-Ugric descendants of the Tauro-Cimmerians who at one point had been absorbed into the Khazars who for Gini however were not Turkic. A further conclusion was that the Ashkenazi arose from "Turko-Tatar converts to Judaism". Though the Khazar-Karaite theory is unsubstantiated by any historical evidence, the early Karaite literature speaks of Khazars as mamzerim, 'bastards' or 'strangers' within Judaism. This myth served a political purpose, of taking that community out of the stranglehold of antisemitic regulations and prejudices directed generally against Jews in Eastern Europe.