The Khazar theory and other 'fake Jews' claims

What it is

The Khazars were a Turkic people who dominated the steppe between the Caucasus and the Volga from roughly the seventh through the tenth centuries, consolidating power in that region by 679 CE. ¹ Around 740 CE the Khazar leadership adopted Judaism, in an account that credits a ruler named Bulan with the decision after a military victory and with building "a tabernacle on the Mosaic model." ¹ A later king, Obadiah, brought in synagogues, schools, and formal rabbinic study, though Khazar Judaism kept shamanist customs alongside it. ¹ In the tenth century Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the Jewish courtier in Muslim Spain, wrote to King Joseph of Khazaria asking about the existence of a Jewish kingdom, and the correspondence survives. ¹ A Russian attack around 965 CE broke Khazar power, and the state had likely disappeared by the eleventh century. ¹

All of that is documented history, and none of it is in dispute. What nobody has produced is a line running from that kingdom to the Jews of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine.

The modern argument that such a line exists got its most serious scientific statement from Eran Elhaik, whose paper "The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry" ran in Genome Biology and Evolution, published online in December 2012. ² Elhaik argued for what he called the Khazarian hypothesis over the conventional Rhineland one, describing the European Jewish genome as a mosaic in which Near Eastern and Caucasus ancestry ran to roughly 32 to 38 percent, Western European around 30 percent, and Middle Eastern roughly 25 to 30 percent. ² A related 2017 paper by Das and colleagues used a geographic localization method to place Ashkenazi origins in northeastern Turkey, near villages whose names resemble the word Ashkenaz, and put the admixture window at 960 to 1,416 CE, the period when the Judaized Khazar kingdom was shrinking. ³ The same paper argued Yiddish emerged through relexification of Slavic rather than from German dialects. ³

It has not held up against larger datasets. In 2013 Doron Behar, Mait Metspalu, and 29 co-authors published "No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews," assembling 1,774 samples from 106 Jewish and non-Jewish populations, including 261 samples from 15 Caucasus populations that earlier work had lacked. ⁴ They found Ashkenazi Jews share the most ancestry with other Jewish populations, and after that with European and Middle Eastern groups, with "no particular similarity" to the peoples who best represent the Khazar region and no sign of significant genetic contribution from within or north of the Caucasus. ⁴ A 2017 study in PLOS Genetics by Xue, Lencz, Darvasi, Pe'er, and Carmi estimated Ashkenazi ancestry at roughly 53 percent European and 47 percent Middle Eastern, with the European share drawing most heavily on Southern Europe and particularly Italy, and stated flatly that a wholly Khazar, Turkish, or Middle Eastern origin has been disqualified. ⁵

Why it still matters

The Khazar theory circulates to make Jewish history in the Land of Israel somebody else's history.

The genetics research itself is an ordinary scientific argument. Two papers say Caucasus, a much larger body of work says Levant plus Southern Europe, and the larger body of work currently wins on sample size and on the Caucasus comparison populations it added. ²³⁴⁵ None of that touches whether Jews are Jews. Conversion has been a route into the Jewish people since the Book of Ruth, and a Jewish kingdom that entered the covenant in 740 CE would be a story to tell at the table. ¹ The Khazar theory only becomes a weapon once you add a premise the science never supplies, which is that descent is what makes a claim legitimate and that the wrong descent voids it.

That premise is doing the same work in claims that never mention Khazars at all. The Anti-Defamation League documents extremist Black Hebrew Israelite groups who hold that Black people are the true chosen people and the actual descendants of the twelve tribes, with the group Israel United In Christ calling Jews "the bastards that funded the slave trade." ⁶ In October 2019 a Miami man, Larry Greene, who went by Elijah Israel, allegedly assaulted synagogue attendees while calling them "fake Jews" and telling them to go back to Israel. ⁶ The ADL is careful to separate those sects from the thousands of Black Jews and Jews of color in the United States, who are Jews without an asterisk. ⁶

As of 2026 the genetics argument is not close, and Behar's 1,774 samples and Xue's admixture estimates are the reason. ⁴⁵ Our view is that the sample sizes are the smaller half of the answer.

The words you'll hear

Khazars. A Turkic people who ruled between the Caucasus and the Volga from about the seventh to the tenth centuries, whose leadership adopted Judaism around 740 CE and whose state broke apart after a Russian attack around 965 CE. ¹

The Khazarian hypothesis. Eran Elhaik's 2013 term for the argument that European Jews descend largely from Khazar and Caucasus populations rather than from the Rhineland route out of the Levant. ²

The Rhineland hypothesis. The conventional account the Khazarian argument was written against, tracing Ashkenazi Jews from the Levant through Southern and Western Europe into Germany and then eastward. ²

Admixture. The genetics term for ancestry from two or more source populations mixing in one group. Xue and colleagues put the Ashkenazi split at roughly 53 percent European and 47 percent Middle Eastern. ⁵

"Fake Jews." The phrase used by extremist Black Hebrew Israelite groups for Jews they consider impostors, including by the man charged with assaulting synagogue attendees in Miami in October 2019. ⁶