The Khazars

It was the Scythians’ counterparts who chose to remain behind in the Don River Basin, who converted to Judaism in the eighth century AD, and who were known as Khazars. The word “Ashkenaz” is thought to have originally applied to the Scythians (Ishkuz), who were called Ashkuza in Assyrian inscriptions. It has also been claimed that the Khazars derived from both the Edomites and the so-called “Lost Tribes”. Like their Edomite ancestors, the Khazars were also red-headed, and came to be known as “Red Jews”.

As outlined by Raphael and Jennifer Patai, in The Myth of the Jewish Race:

...one should remember that the Khazars were described by several contemporary authors as having a pale complexion, blue eyes, and reddish hair. Red, as distinguished from blond, hair is found in a certain percentage of East European Jews, and this, as well as the more generalized light coloring, could be a heritage of the medieval Khazar infusion.³⁸

Pliny said: “The Sakai were among the most distinguished people of Scythia, who settled in Armenia, and were called Sacae-Sani.” Like the Armenians, the Khazars were identified with Gog and Magog. And in an article of the November 2001 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, Ariella Oppenheim, of the Hebrew University of Israel, wrote that her new study revealed that Jews have shared a closer genetic relationship to populations of the Kurds, Anatolian Turks, and Armenians, than to populations in the southern Mediterranean, like the Arabs and Bedouins.

Both Armenian and Georgian historians also record that after the destruction of the first Temple, Nebuchadnezzar transported numbers of Jewish captives, not only to Babylon, but also to Armenia and the Caucasus. By the end of the fourth century BC, some Armenian cities had large Jewish populations. The medieval Armenian historian Moses of Khorene, wrote that King Tigranes II the Great of Armenia, in the first century BC, settled thousands of Jews from Syria and Mesopotamia in Armenia. Josephus wrote that Judean Jews were taken by the Armenian king Artavazd II, and resettled in Armenia, some years after Tigranes’ resettlement.³⁹

Some of these earliest Jewish settlers later converted to Christianity, and were likely responsible for the creation of the Gnostic sect of the Paulicians, some of whom would have settled in the land of the Khazars. The Cambridge Document, discovered by Solomon Schechter in the late nineteenth century, and also known as the Schechter Letter, the Schechter Text, and the Letter of an Anonymous Khazar Jew, discusses how Jewish men fled either through or from Armenia into the Khazar kingdom in ancient times, escaping from “the yoke of the idol-worshippers”. This instance would refer to the persecution meted out in Armenia against the Paulicians.

The Paulicians respected Paul, in addition to the Gospel of Luke, though otherwise rejecting the Old Testament. Paulicianism had its source in the Gnostic cult of Mani, known as Manichaeism. According to the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim, Mani was brought up within a Christian baptismal sect with Gnostic tendencies, resembling that of the Essenes, known as the Mughtasilah.

Manichaeism spread rapidly throughout both the east and west. By 354 AD, Hilary of Poitiers wrote that the Manichaean faith had a significant following in southern France. Its most famous adherent was St. Augustine, who was a Manichean before his conversion to Christianity. The Manichaean faith was also widely persecuted. The faith maintained a sporadic and intermittent existence in west Mesopotamia, Africa, Spain, France, North Italy, the Balkans for a thousand years, and flourished for a time in the land of its birth, Persia. In 1000 AD, the Arab historian Al-Biruni wrote: “The majority of the Eastern Turks, the inhabitants of China and Tibet, and a number in India belong to the religion of Mani”.⁴⁰

According to the Schechter Letter, after the Jews from Armenia and Persia had eventually assimilated almost totally with the nomadic Khazars, a strong war-leader arose, named Bulan, who succeeded in having himself named ruler of the Khazars. Sabriel, who happened to be remotely descended from the early Jewish settlers, and his wife Serakh, convinced him to adopt Judaism, in which his people followed him. The Khazars were said to descend from the Tribe of Simeon, who had been assimilated into the Edomites.

Arthur Koestler, in The Thirteenth Tribe, popularised the theory that the majority of European Ashkenazi Jews are in fact not descended from Israel, but from Khazarian converts to Judaism. However, DNA studies have demonstrated that Ashkenazi communities in Europe were composed mostly through intermarriage of Jewish men with women of European descent. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science report, appears to bear out that Ashkenazi Jews must have arrived in Eastern Europe, not from the west and southwest, but from the south and east, that is, via northern Italy and the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Greek Byzantine empire, the Volga kingdom of the Khazars, or a combination of all three.

In additions, genetic studies have discovered that the hereditary Jewish Levite priesthood contain a marker that is typically found all over Armenia, Georgia, and Eastern Europe in general, including the Serbs, the Poles, and many people of central Europe. Studies concluded that the marker comes from a few men, or perhaps a single ancestor, who lived about 1,000 years ago, just as the Ashkenazim were beginning to be established in Europe. It has been proposed that the ancestor who introduced it into the Ashkenazi Levites could perhaps have been from the Khazars.⁴¹

Footnote:

38 Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai, in The Myth of the Jewish Race (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), page 72.
39 Brook, Kevin Alan. The Unexpected Discovery of the Vestiges of the Medieval Armenian Jews.
40 “Manicheaism”, Catholic Encyclopedia.
41 Coffman, Ellen, “Re: Jews and the Khazars”