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Khazar Legacy in Modern Jewish Scholarship
The scholarly assessment of the Khazar conversion and its Jewish legacy has shifted substantially over two centuries. 19th-century scholars (including Abraham Harkavy and Paul Kokovtsov) established the primary source base: the Khazar Correspondence, the Schechter Letter, and the Cairo Geniza documents. The question of Khazar contribution to Ashkenazi Jewry became politically charged in the 20th century — Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) popularized the claim that most Ashkenazi Jews descend from Khazar converts. Genetic population studies since 2000 (Behar, Skorecki, Hammer and others) have consistently provided strong evidence against the Khazar hypothesis as a primary explanation for Ashkenazi origins: Ashkenazi Jewish men show Y-chromosome haplogroups (J1, J2, E) clustering with ancient Levantine populations rather than Turkic steppe peoples. The current scholarly consensus: Ashkenazi Jews descend primarily from ancient Israelites who intermarried with Southern European (particularly Italian) converts during the Roman diaspora, then maintained strong endogamy. Khazar Jewish refugees likely merged into Ashkenazi communities in Ukraine and Poland but were not their primary founders. The Khazar conversion remains historically significant as the largest recorded conversion of a non-Israelite ruling class to Judaism.