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The Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry holds that many of the Jews of eastern Europe, and through them many Ashkenazi Jews, descend from Khazars who took up Judaism. It is a claim about modern populations. It rests on one event of the Khazar past, the adoption of Judaism by the Khazar elite, and it has been argued from historical and genetic grounds. The claim comes in three strengths, and the debate often runs together arguments about one with evidence for another.

Three strengths of the claim

The strong form says that the majority of eastern Jews, and so of world Jewry, are of Khazar and not of Near Eastern origin. Arthur Koestler put it in these terms in The Thirteenth Tribe. He wrote that the Khazar contribution to the genetic make-up of the Jews “must be substantial, and in all likelihood dominant”.[1] He also wrote that the numerical ratio of the Khazar to the other contributions is impossible to establish.[1] Abraham Poliak asked in the introduction to his Hebrew book Khazaria how far Khazar Jewry could be seen as the nucleus of the large Jewish settlement in eastern Europe. The descendants of that settlement, he wrote, make up the large majority of world Jewry.[2]

A middle form makes the Khazars one contribution among several. Peter B. Golden holds it very likely that Judaised Khazar elements, especially those that had settled in the cities, contributed to the Slavic-speaking Jewish communities of Kievan Rus. He adds that the role of the Khazars in shaping Russian Jewry has been much debated.[3]

A weak form makes no claim about modern populations. It says only that the Khazar khagan, the ruling elite and an inner core of the tribes took up Judaism, probably in its rabbinic form, in the period of Harun al-Rashid (786–809).[4] Shaul Stampfer denies even this and calls the conversion a legend without factual basis.[5]

History of the idea

Ernest Renan gave one of the first prominent statements of the hypothesis in a lecture to the Cercle Saint-Simon in Paris on 27 January 1883. He said that the kingdom of the Khazars, which held almost the whole of southern Russia, took up Judaism about the time of Charlemagne. The large Jewish populations of the Danube lands and southern Russia, he thought, had probably little or nothing that was ethnographically Jewish.[6] He supported this with Hebrew inscriptions from the Crimea that carry Tatar names. These come from the circle of Abraham Firkovich, and their authenticity is doubted.

Poliak’s Khazaria (Tel Aviv 1944, second edition 1951) made the Khazars the nucleus of eastern European Jewry.[2] Koestler’s book of 1976 carried the hypothesis to a world readership. He gave a motive in his own words: if it proved true, the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning.[1] Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Hebrew 2008, English 2009) uses the Khazar case, with others, against the idea of a single exiled Jewish people.[7]

Stampfer rejects the hypothesis on historical grounds. He argues that the sources for the Khazar conversion are unreliable and that a migration from Khazaria to Poland does not agree with what is known of the Jewish settlement in the east.[5]

Khazar sources on the reach of Judaism

The Arabic geographers describe Judaism in Khazaria as the faith of the ruler and his circle. Ibn Rusta says that the ruler, the Isha and the generals and chief men of his mind are Jews, and that the rest keep a religion like that of the Turks.[8] al-Istakhri calls the Jews the smallest group in Khazaria.[9] One modern study holds that Muslims were probably the largest community in the cities and the Christians the second. It also holds that local Jewish communities, in particular in the Crimea, were substantial. Beyond this, it says, the sources do not allow a conclusion.[10] The reply of King Joseph in the Khazar correspondence states that Bulan and all his people were circumcised, which differs from both geographers.[11]

Khazar Judaism was probably not of the Karaite kind, and the descent of the Karaites of eastern Europe from the Khazars cannot be shown.[12] No source records a migration of Khazar Jews to the west.

Genetic research

Genetic studies have tested the hypothesis in several ways. They face a basic problem. No contemporary population is identified, by itself or by historians, as Khazars or their descendants.[13] DNA from the Khazar elite is absent as well.[14]

Two surveys of Ashkenazi genomes

Doron Behar and colleagues compared 1,774 samples from 106 Jewish and non-Jewish populations, among them 222 samples from thirteen populations of the Caucasus and 39 from two populations of the Volga, the largest genome-wide set overlapping the Khazar region.[15] Ashkenazi Jews lay beside other Jewish populations, between southern Europeans and the Middle East, and did not overlap populations of the Khazar region. The study found no indication of a significant genetic contribution from within or from north of the Caucasus.[16] It added a limit. A Khazar or other Caucasus admixture below the level of detectability could not be ruled out, and any undetected Khazar contribution lies below a minimal threshold.[17]

Eran Elhaik reached the opposite conclusion. He used Armenians and Georgians as stand-ins for the Khazars. He concluded that the findings supported the Khazarian hypothesis and that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations that includes Judaised Khazars, Greco-Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews and Judeans.[18] Behar and colleagues objected to the stand-ins. Armenians and Georgians belong to the south of the Caucasus, while the khaganate was centred in the north and beyond. If similarity to them meant Khazar ancestry, then Middle Eastern Jews and many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern populations would be Khazar descendants as well.[19] The Elhaik study gives no fixed percentage for a Khazar share.[20] In 2016 Elhaik and co-authors placed most Ashkenazi Jews in north-eastern Anatolia and proposed a Slavo-Iranian confederation, which is not the Khazar argument of 2012.[21] A critique of 2016 held that the method used is hardly suited to admixed populations and to tracing ancestry back a thousand years. It added that all methods of historical linguistics hold Yiddish to be Germanic, with no reliable evidence of Slavic, Iranian or Turkic substrata.[22]

Mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome

A study of 2013 found that four founders, which account for about 40 per cent of Ashkenazi mitochondrial variation, have their ancestry in prehistoric Europe and not in the Near East or the Caucasus. Its best estimate was 81 per cent European ancestry for the maternal lines, 8 per cent Near Eastern, 1 per cent from further east in Asia and 10 per cent unresolved. Virtually none of the lines was likely to come from the North Caucasus.[23] The paternal side had a candidate. Behar and colleagues had found in 2003 that more than half of Ashkenazi Levites carry one lineage of haplogroup R1a. They left open whether it was a European contribution or a trace of the lost Khazars.[13] A study of 2013 found the marker M582 absent in 922 eastern Europeans and present in all R1a Levites.[24] It also occurs in 5.9 per cent of 303 Near Eastern men with R1a, and the authors interpret this as a Near Eastern source for the Levite founder lineage.[24]

Genome-wide models

A study of 2014 describes the Ashkenazi Jews as an even admixture of European and probably Middle Eastern origin, with a bottleneck of about 350 individuals.[25] A study of 2017 places the main source of the European share in southern Europe, at about 60 to 80 per cent, and the rest probably in eastern Europe. It dates the admixture to about thirty generations ago. It does not model a Khazar component.[26] A study of 2022 sequenced 33 Ashkenazi individuals of the fourteenth century from Erfurt. They resemble modern Ashkenazi Jews, with more variability in eastern European related ancestry. The study dates the founder event of the Ashkenazi Jews before the fourteenth century. It does not test the Khazar hypothesis.[27]

DNA from the Khazar world

A survey of 2026 of 48 genomes from the northern Black Sea region lists the population of the Khazar Khaganate among those for which genomic data are still absent.[14] A study of 2026 sequenced three individuals from the Khazar-period layer of Phanagoria. They do not overlap the cluster of modern Jewish populations. They are closest to Turkic-speaking Central Asians and to the Avars and medieval Mongols. They lived in a city under Khazar rule, and nothing shows that they belonged to the elite or were Jews.[28] A study of 2025 of individuals of the Saltiv culture in Ukraine, dated 800 to 900, found two groups, one close to the Caucasus and one close to Central Asia, and identifies them as Alans and Bulgars and not as Khazars.[29] It notes that the culture was shared among several groups.[29]

Summary of the genetic findings

No genome-wide data set shows a detectable Khazar component in Ashkenazi Jews, and the same studies cannot exclude a small one. None of them gives a percentage for it.[17] The R1a trace of the Levites has been traced to the Near East.[24] A historian may hold that a small Khazar contribution is possible, but it is a historical possibility and not a genetic finding.

Use outside scholarship

In late Soviet and post-Soviet nationalist writing, the word “Khazars” served as a euphemism for “Jews”.[30] Lev Gumilev’s “Jewish-Khazar chimera” of the 1970s is the best-known case. A study of 2023 finds that his revision went far beyond the findings of Mikhail Artamonov and drew Russian nationalists mainly through its antisemitic narrative.[31] These uses belong to the reception of the Khazars and do not bear on the historical question.

References

  1. ^ a b c Koestler 1976
  2. ^ a b Poliak 1944; 2nd ed. 1951
  3. ^ Golden 1992, p. 243
  4. ^ Golden 1992, p. 241
  5. ^ a b Stampfer 2013
  6. ^ Renan 27. Januar 1883
  7. ^ Sand hebr. 2008; engl. 2009
  8. ^ Ibn Rusta
  9. ^ al-Iṣṭakhrī; Dunlop 1954, p. 92
  10. ^ Golden 1992, p. 241–242
  11. ^ The Khazar correspondence; Marcus 1938, p. 230
  12. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 266–267
  13. ^ a b al. Dezember 2013, p. 864
  14. ^ a b al. 2026
  15. ^ al. Dezember 2013, p. 865
  16. ^ al. Dezember 2013, p. 860, 880
  17. ^ a b al. Dezember 2013, p. 883
  18. ^ Elhaik online 14.12.2012; 2013, p. 61–74
  19. ^ al. Dezember 2013, p. 864, 884
  20. ^ Elhaik online 14.12.2012; 2013
  21. ^ Das 2016
  22. ^ Flegontov 2016
  23. ^ Costa 2013
  24. ^ a b c Rootsi 2013
  25. ^ al. 2014
  26. ^ Xue 2017
  27. ^ Waldman 2022
  28. ^ al. 2026
  29. ^ a b al. 2025
  30. ^ Schnirelman 2007
  31. ^ Racyn 2023

Sources

Literature

  • Douglas M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars (1954)
  • Jacob R. Marcus (ed., trans.), The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (1938)
  • Ernest Renan, Le Judaïsme comme race et comme religion (27. Januar 1883)
  • A. N. Poliak, Khazaria (Kazariyah) (1944; 2nd ed. 1951)
  • Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (1976)
  • Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (hebr. 2008; engl. 2009)
  • Sh. Stampfer, Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism? (2013)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
  • Doron M. Behar et al., No Evidence from Genome-wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews (Dezember 2013)
  • Eran Elhaik, The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses (online 14.12.2012; 2013)
  • R. Das; P. Wexler; M. Pirooznia; E. Elhaik, Localizing Ashkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz (2016)
  • P. Flegontov; A. Kassian; M. G. Thomas; V. Fedchenko; P. Changmai; G. Starostin, Pitfalls of the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) Approach Applied to Human Genetic History: A Case Study of Ashkenazi Jews (2016)
  • M. D. Costa; J. B. Pereira; M. Pala et al.; M. B. Richards, A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages (2013)
  • S. Rootsi; D. M. Behar et al., Phylogenetic applications of whole Y-chromosome sequences and the Near Eastern origin of Ashkenazi Levites (2013)
  • S. Carmi et al., Genomstudie zu 128 Aschkenasen (Titel in der Recherchemappe nicht genannt) (2014)
  • J. Xue; T. Lencz; A. Darvasi; I. Pe'er; S. Carmi, The time and place of European admixture in Ashkenazi Jewish history (2017)
  • S. Waldman; D. Backenroth; É. Harney et al.; S. Carmi; D. Reich, Genome-wide data from medieval German Jews show that the Ashkenazi founder event pre-dated the 14th century (2022)
  • Saag et al., Studie zu 91 Genomen aus der Ukraine, darunter Saltiv-Kultur (Titel in der Recherchemappe nicht genannt) (2025)
  • Okovantsev et al., Ganzgenome von drei Individuen aus Phanagoria (Titel in der Recherchemappe nicht genannt) (2026)
  • Aituganova et al., Meta-Analyse von 48 Genomen aus dem nördlichen Schwarzmeerraum (Titel in der Recherchemappe nicht genannt) (2026)
  • V. A. Schnirelman, The Story of a Euphemism (2007)
  • Racyn, Studie zu Artamonov und Gumiljow (Titel in der Recherchemappe nicht genannt) (2023)

Related

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “The Khazar–Ashkenazi hypothesis.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/historiography/khazar-ashkenazi-hypothesis/

Last revised: 8 November 2026