The True Origin of the Jews as Khazars, Israelites, or Canaanites - Ron Unz

For those interested in exploring the subject in greater detail, I would strongly recommend the enormously comprehensive Wikipedia page on the Khazar Hypothesis, which runs nearly 13,000 words including copious references and a large section on the genetic evidence. However, being Wikipedia, we must treat its claims on such a controversial topic with considerable caution. For example, I noticed that in the Antisemitism section, the article stated that Wilmot Robertson, the founding father of modern American White Nationalism was an adherent, but when I checked, I found that he had actually dismissed the Khazar Hypothesis as “One of the oldest of racial old wives’ tales,” declaring that it had been conclusively debunked by genetic evidence.

The Wikipedia article also devoted a subsection to the very controversial work of Israeli-American geneticist Eran Elhaik, who has published several papers over the last decade attempting to revive the Khazar Hypothesis, but with a large majority of genetic researchers being sharply critical of his methodology and findings. I read one of Elhaik’s major articles along with a supportive summary, as well as two other papers by leading research teams presenting the contrary, mainstream perspective.

My technical expertise in genetic analysis isn’t sufficiently strong to properly evaluate these conflicting arguments, but one of Elhaik’s major claims caught my attention. He contrasted his own “Khazarian Hypothesis” of Jewish origins with the mainstream “Rhineland Hypothesis,” but repeatedly claimed that the latter asserted that Ashkenazi Jews were solely the descendants of the Semitic Judeans, which seems a total misstatement of that position. Instead, mainstream researchers describe those Jews as a hybrid population, perhaps half Middle Eastern but almost half European, a very different assumption.

Population ancestry is commonly analyzed by examining a PCA chart of genetic markers and the one provided in Elhaik’s paper showed that the Eastern and Central European Jews seem to cluster part-way between Europeans and Middle Easterners, exactly as we would expect, and completely distant from the Turks. So I saw nothing that would lead me to doubt the mainstream perspective.

Source : https://www.unz.com/

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