i've recorded about 500 videos on jewish history now and one of the things that used
to surprise me unfortunately doesn't surprise me anymore is that in the top 10 of popularity
my handful of videos on the ghazar conversion remain very popular and at first i thought you
know that's a really cool thing but now i begin to think it says something unfortunate about humanity
uh so for this video and the next which are going to focus on the unusual chapter of khazar jewry
in our larger project i'm going to first speak about something that is frequently uh posed as
a question and i'll answer definitively the answer is no ashkenazi jews are not khazars they are not
descended from the khazar people if they have any connection with the khazar it is very very
tiny in proportion to the overwhelming hole which is largely european and middle eastern
in background so let's take some time to understand what the big controversy is about
and what is the resolution to something which is a burning question for many people first of all
what is the hypothesis although it is shrouded in mystery most historians coalesce around the idea
that a population in the region of the caspian sea uh not too far from the northern black sea
encompassing part of south eastern europe converted to judaism sometime in the 8th century
they had come into existence in the sixth century as a proto empire and then began expanding
until they were finally defeated by the people of kievan rus that would be uh based in today's cave
ukraine in the 10th century and then they basically disappeared so here's a map that
shows you roughly where the khazar empire would have stretched again we can't use like really firm
boundaries but this is the general area now at the same time more or less you have the establishment
of jewish ashkenaz which is associated primarily with germany with the rhineland
and we begin to see jewish settlement there from somewhere around the 10th century onward the name
ashkenaz is a biblical origin but it is applied in the medieval period to this region of germany
now from what we know from lots of other sources there's a pretty significant eastward expansion
or migration of the jews of ashkenaz to eastern europe for reasons that i'm looking forward to
discussing with you in later videos but there's a lot of spread of ashkenazi jews to the east
and from there they constitute the the largest single demographic chunk of european ashkenazi
jews as a whole looking at this uh outline here in yellow is basically where most ashkenazi jews
trace their origins to of course there's a big migration uh to the americas particularly from
eastern europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and that's basically the migration that
my own ancestors came from and that's basically the story the term ashkenazi again derives from
medieval germany although most of those jews who used that term later migrated to eastern europe
and then from there many of them to america israel and so on that's to distinguish them from other
ethnic groups within the jewish people such as the spartan who trace their origins primarily to
the iberian peninsula god willing we'll talk a lot more about them shortly now here's the khazarian
hypothesis since there is something of an overlap between the limits of the khazar empire which had
some kind of connection possibly a conversion to judaism perhaps in the 8th century and the
population of jews that by the time you get to the 20th century the vast bulk of ashkenazi jews
are living in eastern europe the khazar hypothesis says that the jews that call themselves ashkenazim
coming from eastern europe are not descendants of the german ashkenazim they are actually
descendants from the khazars and and that's the well that's it in a nutshell now why should we
care about this is something that we'll talk about in the next video but that's the essence of the
khazar hypothesis that the jews who originate from eastern europe are primarily descended from this
turkic tribe living in central asia perhaps one of the most significant thinkers and writers on this
period is professor xiaowil stamford of hebrew university uh great scholars written quite a
bit on eastern european jewish history and he's published quite a bit on khazaria in particular he
has a very jaundiced view of the entire conversion process as a whole the entire conversion story
which i'll speak about in the next video but he says there are a few really clear reasons why we
can say that ashkenazi jews are not the center from the khasars first of all there is no dna
evidence to support this now if you go back in my earlier videos as i've been doing these over
the last 10 years there's been growing amounts of data and you'll see slight changes even in my own
presentation because of the appearance of new data dna evidence is one of the most exciting
tools that historians have in their you know uh toolbox and when it comes to the question of
you know biological dissent as opposed to halachic identity jewish identity by jewish law which is
a different thing although they tend to overlap like a venn diagram it's really clear that there's
no dna evidence or a very tiny element of dna evidence to support the idea of a khazar origin
to eastern european ashkenazi jewry now one exception to that rule is the professor iran l
haik who's written some interesting things on this but he remains controversial and most scholars
are not accepting the research that he's presented specifically on khazaria now
without being a scientist and be able to get into the real nuts and bolts of this what i've read
about this is that he prepared in 2013 i think it was first published uh an analysis of about 1300
y chromosomes 1300 people looking at their y chromosomes to try to see what the similarities
were between jews and about 75 odd other nationalities unfortunately the sample was
really really small of the jews only eight fit the specific parameters that we're looking at
right now that's a tiny number to really make huge statements about the vast majority of ashkenazi
jews secondly more significantly the number of khazar individuals studied were precisely zero
because there are no hazards today and in fact we haven't had any hazards for about a thousand
years there has been no one walking around who claims hazard descent to whom we can go to for
genetic data in other words you can't compare jews to hazards if you don't have any hazards to
actually say oh you're a khazar great let's take your dna so what he did was he essentially guessed
an educated guess using georgians and armenians which live roughly in the same area but with a
thousand years of population movement it's really hard to say that that's reasonable at all so it's
considered widely to be a very unreliable estimate and most scholars particularly most historians
are not accepting this limited data evidence to suggest that jews come from azaria
secondly you know we can pile on the burden of proof here the second thing is there's absolutely
no linguistic evidence of hazard influence on jews i mean one of the things that we would certainly
expect to see is that jews would pick up khazar terminology in their yiddish yiddish by the way
is the the overwhelmingly dominant uh native language of the jews who call themselves ashkenazi
originating from eastern europe at the turn of the 20th century there was a census in
the russian empire and i think was 98 percent of ukrainian jews 97 of jews throughout the empire i
remember correctly claimed yiddish as their mother tongue and there is no discernible evidence of a
turkic in yiddish there are some interesting words here and there that are kind of of uncertain
derivation uh the professor named vine right who is one of the most important theorists of early
yiddish who argues that the word davin which means to pray might come from a turk origin but it's
it's kind of up in the air absolutely yiddish is basically german it's overwhelmingly german
arguments to the contrary that it's its grammar is essentially slavic is nonsensical to anyone
who has studied all three language groups if you've studied german if you studied
some slavic languages and you've studied yiddish you know that yiddish is overwhelmingly german
written with hebrew characters with a significant borrowing of hebrew aramaic both jewish languages
and a certain amount of french and all the various words that that come along as the
jews are traveling through their migrations the small elements of slavic grammar that are visible
particularly in the eastern dialects of of yiddish which is not at all surprising given that we're
talking about living in a slavic area they're not turkic they're slavic very different languages
and they're basically like uses of aspect and other finer grammatical forms so bottom line is
yiddish is way way more german than it is turkic the turkic elements the khazar
elements are vanishingly small if they exist at all third there's no cultural evidence i mean
where are the you know the recipes where are the folk customs where are the superstitions
the stories the legends the songs that one would expect to come from turkic origins
we simply don't have them in ashkenazi culture we have lots of russian things lots of ukrainians
especially lots of ukrainian polish and so on after a thousand years of living in the region
we have evidence of german of latin of french types of cultural uh you know accretions that
follow the jews they travel but we don't have any khazarian things so the you know the burden
of proof is clearly on those who want to push this theory the overwhelming amount of evidence
suggests that the model of jewish migration from ashkenaz is exactly what happened historically
so then that brings us to the next question where did ashkenazi jews come from and i get this
question a lot actually so this is doron behar who is a remarkable geneticist who's really advanced
the the field quite a bit and he's done some great studies of dna and the muslim muslim just
appeared in the last few years one of the most fascinating things that he discovered is that 40
of all ashkenazi jews are descended from precisely four women apparently of european origin
uh and there's some indication that they lived about a thousand years ago or perhaps a little
bit earlier no indication they lived uh looked like they knew each other but uh there are four
specific women that seems to have had a tremendous impact on ashkenazi jews furthermore statistically
speaking there are significant similarities between non-ashkenazi jews like safari jews
and mizrahi jews and so on with ashkenazi jews so in other words it still seems to be one big family
despite the superficial differences in skin tone and and hair texture and so on but jews seem to be
more or less one family and there are significant distinctions between especially in eastern europe
between jews and the peoples among whom they live so in other words this all basically
fits with the common sense idea of the jews moving from western europe into eastern europe
the kind of elements that dr bihar was able to map out include something called genetic drift
which helps to account for some of the superficial presentation of ashkenazi
people as a layperson my understanding of genetic drift is basically when you have and
by the way i'll show you a y chromosome study in a second that shows a lot more about jewish males
than jewish females this happens when as is very common and well documented uh non-jewish women
adopt judaism and marry into the jewish people this may be a much more pronounced conversion
women converting to judaism than men converting to judaism this helps account for the physical
distinctions between let's say mediterranean jewry and eastern european jewry you also have a
phenomenon which is consistent with the historical record of a genetic bottleneck where you have a
population of people that for a variety of reasons which could be social economic political it could
have to do with persecution massacres wars things like that but a larger group of people
are suddenly shrunk over a period of time to be a much smaller population like a bottleneck
forms and that means that there are much fewer people from whom the later ancestors derived their
origins this helps explain the the fairly large number of genetic disorders that unfortunately
afflict ashkenazi jews like breast cancer and tay sachs which may owe a lot to the fact that there
was this bottleneck perhaps around the turn of the millennium that meant that the population of
jews living in northern europe that would later move to the east represent the basis of a much
larger population so the bottom line of all of this is that it's pretty much what we always
were thinking although italy may be more important than most historians have thought have a look at
this map here which is also part of dr bihar's research and this is looking specifically at
levites on the y chromosome now levites like kohanim are members of the priestly family
and they are and it's only the males it's passed down father to son mothers do not pass down
the levite connection so looking at the y chromosomes of ashkenazi jews he was able
to determine that it appears that they are they do have origins consistent with
a middle eastern distant origin and then a strong migration through the italian peninsula
to the ashkenazic heartland in germany that would be numbers one through two in this particular map
and then number three is as we expected a large migration towards the east where most ashkenazi
levites find their origins going back through that that original vector and then as you can see the
kind of uh the faded line there of the extension towards the west along with the arrow labeled
number four there is a a reference back as those ashkenazi levites begin to move to the west and in
fact begin to form families with sephardic women and non-ashkenazi jews generally in the iberian
peninsula it is probably at the point number two on this map when those four mothers appeared
probably somewhere around the year 1 000 and then are responsible for this huge expansion
of ashkenazic jewry and as a result a tremendous popularity of asian food now in america and so on
now if you look at these uh the green lines here uh this is the traditional view of the
uh migration of jews historically which there's a lot to say for this and it is this does not
contradict the historical model uh that we have well-documented jews moving their way across the
coast of north africa but that particular route would not necessarily explain the origins of most
ashkenazi levites in other words while jews may have been moving along that route number five
they do not account for the large number of levites in the ashkenazi community and so
it's not demonstrated by the research that he has worked on nevertheless we do have jews
moving along the course of north africa just not necessarily levites that would end up producing
lines among the ashkenazim it's so complicated to see this in so many ways but you get the
basic idea right okay so that's our short answer ashkenazi jews are not descended from the khazars
they are descended from the middle east and possibly through a an italian vector
and there are four women ironically you know the the sour rebecca rachel
and leia of ashkenazi jews account for almost half of all ashkenazi jews today
in the next video let us actually go to khazaria and try to figure out what did happen in the 8th
century what can we say about it intelligently okay thank you very much for watching