---
title: "Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry"
chunk: 1/8
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"
---

The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, often called the Khazar myth by its critics, is a largely abandoned historical hypothesis that postulated that Ashkenazi Jews were primarily, or to a large extent, descended from converts to Judaism among the Khazars, a multi-ethnic conglomerate of mostly Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic khanate in and around the northern and central Caucasus and the Pontic–Caspian steppe in the late 6th century CE. It is still sometimes used in antisemitic conspiracy theories and in various anti-Zionist approaches. 
The hypothesis draws on medieval sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which at some point in the 8th–9th centuries, a small number of Khazars were said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism. The hypothesis also postulates that after collapse of the Khazar empire, the Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and made up a large part of the Jews there.  The scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain, but the evidence used to tie the subsequent Ashkenazi communities to the Khazars is meager and subject to conflicting interpretations.
Speculation that Europe's Jewish population originated among the Khazars has persisted for two centuries, from at least as early as 1808. In the late 19th century, Ernest Renan and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe originated among refugees who had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into Europe. Though intermittently evoked by several scholars since that time, the Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe in 1976. It has been revived recently by geneticist Eran Elhaik, who in 2013 conducted a study aiming to vindicate it.
Genetic studies on Jews have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews. Geneticists such as Doron Behar and others (2013) have concluded that such a link is unlikely, noting that it is difficult to test the Khazar hypothesis using genetics because there is lack of clear modern descendants of the Khazars that could provide a clear test of the contribution to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, but found no genetic markers in Ashkenazi Jews that would link them to peoples of the Caucasus/Khazar area. Gil Atzmon et al. found evidence that the Ashkenazi have mixed Near Eastern and Southern European/Mediterranean origins, though some admixture with Khazar and Slavic populations after 100 CE was not excluded. Xue et al. note a wholly Khazar/Turkish/Middle Eastern origin is out of the question, given the complexity of Ashkenazi admixtures.
Some anti-Zionists have cited the Khazar hypothesis in an attempt to discredit the claim by modern Jews to the Land of Israel. The Khazar hypothesis is also sometimes cited in antisemitic arguments promoted by adherents of various movements and ideologies to express the belief that modern Jews are not true descendants of the Israelites.

== History ==

=== 1806–1918 ===
Lawrence J. Epstein attributes to the Ukrainian Rabbi Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860) the first reference of a connection between the Ashkenazi Jews and the Khazars. According to Jacob S. Raisin, Levinsohn expressed the opinion that Russian Jews hailed from the banks of the Volga. Levinsohn wrote in 1828:

Our elders told us that some generations earlier the Jews in these parts spoke only this Russian language, and this Ashkenazi Jewish language we speak now had not yet spread among all the Jews living in these regions.
The hypothesis was advanced nonetheless earlier, in 1808, by Johann Ewers in his Vom Ursprung des russischen Staats ("On the origins of the Russian state") in the context of an early controversy over the foundations of the Russian state, which pitted scholars espousing a Norman origin for the Varangians against those who argued that these founders of the Kievan Rus' were Slavic and indigenous. Ewers proposed the idea that the Viking/Varangian founders were in fact Khazars. The Russian historian Nikolay Karamzin advanced the claim, asserting that considerable numbers of Khazars had left Khazaria for Kievan Rus' in the time of Vladimir I (980–1015). The German Orientalist Karl Neumann suggested as early as 1847 that the migration of Khazars might have contributed to the formation of the core population of the Jews of Eastern Europe, without however specifying whether he was referring to Judaizing Turks or ethnic Jewish residents of Khazaria.
Subsequently, Abraham Eliyahu Harkavi suggested in 1869 that there might be a link between the Khazars and European Jews. Three years later, however, in 1872, a Crimean Karaite, Abraham Firkovich, alternatively proclaimed that the members of his Turkic-speaking sect were descended from Turkic converts to Judaism. This hypothesis, that the descendants of Khazar converts to Judaism formed a major proportion of Ashkenazim, was first proposed to a Western public by Ernest Renan in 1883. In a lecture delivered in Paris before the Saint-Simon Foundation on 27 January 1883, Renan argued that conversion played a significant role in the formation of the Jewish people, stating that: