Are Ashkenazi Jews descended from Khazar converts rather than the Middle East?

“Ashkenazi Jews aren’t really Jewish: they descend from Khazar converts, not the Middle East.”

A pseudo-scientific antisemitic trope that the genetics have buried. The claim is that European (Ashkenazi) Jews descend from the Khazars, a medieval Turkic people whose elite reportedly adopted Judaism, and so have no real tie to the Land of Israel. Genome-wide studies say the opposite. Behar et al. (2013) analysed 1,774 samples across more than 100 populations and found “no evidence” of a Khazar contribution to Ashkenazi ancestry. Atzmon et al. (2010), “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,” found that Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews form distinct clusters that all share substantial Middle Eastern ancestry and sit close to other Levantine populations. The one paper claiming Khazar origins used modern Armenians as “Khazar” stand-ins, a method dozens of geneticists called unsound. Jews of every branch trace to the same ancient homeland.

Where the claim came from

The Khazars were a real Turkic-led confederation that ruled the steppe between the Caspian and Black Seas from roughly the 7th to the 10th century. Correspondence between the Khazar king Joseph and the Cordoban Jewish statesman Hasdai ibn Shaprut, preserved in the Cairo Genizah, records that a Khazar khagan adopted Judaism around 740 CE, and that the practice spread among the ruling elite. That conversion is not in dispute among historians. What is a modern invention is the leap from “some Khazars became Jewish” to “Ashkenazi Jews are the Khazars.”

The leap was first floated seriously by the French orientalist Ernest Renan in the 19th century and developed academically by the historian Abraham Poliak in a 1951 Hebrew-language book. It reached mass audiences through Arthur Koestler’s 1976 book “The Thirteenth Tribe,” which argued most Ashkenazi Jews were Khazar descendants, a thesis Koestler, a novelist and journalist rather than a geneticist or historian of the region, framed as removing the theological basis for antisemitism by making European Jews non-Semitic. The book was popular but was never accepted by specialists in Khazar history. It found a second life in 2008 when Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand revived it in “The Invention of the Jewish People,” a work of political argument rather than genetic or archival research, again rejected by the geneticists who actually study the question.

The genetic record, in detail

The strongest version of the claim points to real gaps: no full genome from an identified Khazar burial has ever been sequenced, and Ashkenazi Jews carry some Eastern European admixture picked up over a thousand years of life on that continent, so a Turkic contribution is not, on its face, absurd. The population data close the gap anyway. Behar et al., “The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people” (Nature, 2010), and the follow-up Behar et al. (2013) study in Human Biology, sampled Jewish communities worldwide alongside more than 100 comparison populations and found Ashkenazi Jews cluster tightly with other Jewish diaspora groups and with Levantine populations, with no detectable Khazar or broader Turkic signal. Atzmon et al. (2010) reached the same result independently: Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews each retain a distinguishable Middle Eastern genetic core beneath their local admixture, consistent with a shared origin roughly 2,500 years ago followed by geographic dispersal, not with three unrelated populations that separately chose the same religion.

The single study behind the modern revival, Eran Elhaik’s 2013 paper in Genome Biology and Evolution, reconstructed a “Khazar” reference population using present-day Armenians and Georgians as proxies, since no Khazar DNA sample exists to test against directly. Reviewers and rival geneticists, including several of the Behar and Atzmon co-authors, called the substitution methodologically unsound: modern Armenians and Georgians are not Khazars, and standing in for an extinct population with a geographically nearby but ethnically distinct one can manufacture whatever signal the substitution is built to find. The paper has not been replicated. Separately, Yiddish itself undercuts the theory: it is a Germanic language built on a Rhineland dialect base with Hebrew and Slavic loanwords, not a Turkic one, and Ashkenazi communities are documented in the Rhine valley as early as the 4th century CE, before the Khazar elite’s conversion even occurred.

Who pushes it today

The claim circulates in two overlapping lanes. Online antisemitic forums and white-nationalist networks use it as a “not-real-Jews” argument, sometimes paired with the Black Hebrew Israelite inversion that only non-white claimants are the “true” Israelites. Anti-Zionist activists use a softer version to argue Ashkenazi Israelis specifically have no ancestral claim to the land, treating Jewish indigeneity itself as negotiable. Soviet propaganda deployed a version of the Khazar theory during the Cold War to cast Zionism as a foreign colonial project with no Middle Eastern roots. Sand’s book gave the argument an academic-sounding citation that still circulates in these spaces, despite carrying no support from the population geneticists who study Jewish ancestry directly.

The one real fact behind the myth, and why it doesn’t reach Ashkenazi Jews

The strongest version of the objection: a Turkic ruling elite did adopt Judaism in the 8th century, and a Jewish Khazar political entity existed for roughly two centuries before the khaganate collapsed under Rus and Byzantine pressure around 969 CE. That conversion is real history, not denial.

It is also irrelevant to the ancestry question. The genetic studies find no measurable line from that population into today’s Ashkenazi Jews, who show the same Middle Eastern genetic anchor as Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews regardless of which European or Islamic-world diaspora they passed through afterward. A vanished kingdom’s ruling class converting seven centuries before Yiddish even existed shows that Jews once had Turkic neighbors. It does not show that Jews descend from them, and the DNA says they do not.

One people, one genome: the myth the DNA refused to confirm

The Khazar myth is the genetic edition of “colonisers with no connection to the land,” an effort to sever Jews from their origin so the indigenous claim can be handed elsewhere. The DNA refuses to play along: Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are one people, and that people began in the Levant.