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

=== Germany ===
The Khazar hypothesis was promoted by the former Nazi scholar Herman Wirth (1885-1981), who wrote an anti-Semitic legal report in 1958 that questioned the origins of the Jewish People and relativized the Holocaust. It was central to his Palestinabuch (Book of Palestine), the extensive manuscript of which was lost for unclear reasons in the 1970s. It was his theory that the Ashkenazi Jews descended from a superstitious slave people (Khazars) on the fringes of a mythical Nordic civilization (Shambhala) in the Gobi Desert. According to Wirth, Christ descended from a lost tribe of the original Aryans, who had left their traces in the Near East in the form of Megalithic monuments. 
The Palestinabuch was meant as a counterpart to Wirth's Ura Linda Chronicle (1933) on the ancient Frisians, whom he considered direct descendants of the first Aryans and whose origins he located in Palestine. It was officially titled The Riddle of the Palestine's Megalithic Graves: From JAU to Jesus. By 1969 the proposed title had changed into Between the North Sea and the Sea of Genezareth, implicitly referring to an influential book by the 19th-century German reactionary Julius Langbehn.
The myth of the lost Palestinabuch was promoted by the Chilean fascist and anti-Semite Miguel Serrano and picked up by the Russian political theorist Alexandr Dugin, who devoted his indicative book Hyperborean Theory (1993) to Herman Wirth's legacy. Wirth's ideas were also echoed by the German conspiracy theorist Jan van Helsing, who wrote several influential books on secret societies, as well as by the New Age influencer David Icke.

=== Cults ===
Aum Shinrikyo is a Japanese doomsday cult. The cult was active in Japan and Russia, with an estimated 10,000 and 30,000 followers respectively. The group's Manual of Fear used The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in addition to other antisemitic material. The manual claimed that the Jews are really Khazars intent on world domination.
The Khazar theory has also become part of the Ascended Masters theology. Hatonn, an extraterrestrial, transmits messages including the complete text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He identifies the authors of The Protocols as Khazars and speaks of false Zionist Jews who have usurped and controlled the true Jews.

== See also ==
Wentworth Arthur Matthew
Ernest Renan – French Orientalist and Semitic scholar
Khazarian Mafia
Genetic history of Europe
History of the Jews in Turkey
Japanese-Jewish common ancestry theory
Japhetic theory
Jewish ethnic divisions
Jewish history
Kuzari
List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
Rus' Khaganate
Theory of Kashmiri descent from lost tribes of Israel
Timeline of the Turkic peoples (500–1300)

== Notes ==

== References ==

=== Sources ===

== Further reading ==

== External links ==
Rory Miller(2020) The anti-Zionist 'Jewish Khazar' syndrome in the official British mind
Fishberg, Maurice (1911): The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.
The Kievan Letter scan in the Cambridge University Library collection.
Khazaria.com
Resources - Medieval Jewish History - The Khazars The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Khazar Historic Maps
The Kitab al-Khazari of Judah Hallevi, full English translation at sacred-texts.com
Ancient lost capital of the Khazar kingdom found Archived 13 April 2010 at the Wayback Machine