Jews descend from ancient Israel, of course. At least that's what I was taught in Hebrew school. Sure, Jews migrated over the centuries, often by force, thus creating the diaspora that, it could be argued, allowed the Jewish people to survive to this day. But ultimately you can trace the origin of the Jewish people back to ancient Israel, right?
Well, maybe not, according to Eran Elhaik, a genetic scientist at Johns Hopkins University whose paper, "The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses," explores the genetic origins of Jews of European descent. Eastern European Jews, a/k/a Ashkenazi Jews (of which I am one) account for nearly 90 percent of the 13 million Jews worldwide. (Ehliak rejects use of the term Ashkenazi Jews because "the Hebrew word 'Ashkenaz' was applied to Germany in medieval rabbinical literature - contributing to the narrative that modern Eastern European Jewry originated on the Rhine.").
The Rhineland hypothesis is what learned in Hebrew School. It posits that modern European Jews are descendants of the Judeans - an assortment of Israelite-Canaanite tribes of Semitic origin. According to this hypothesis, there were two mass migratory waves of Jews: the first occurred over the two hundred years following the Muslim conquest of Palestine (638 CE) and consisted of Judeans who left Muslim Palestine for Europe. The second wave occurred at the beginning of the 15th century by a group of 50,000 German Jews who migrated eastward.
The competing “Khazarian Hypothesis” posits that Eastern European Jews are descendants of the Khazars, a confederation of tribes in the central-northern Caucasus who converted to Judaism in the 8th century. According to the Khazarian Hypothesis, European Jews are comprised of Caucasus, European, and Middle Eastern ancestries.
Elhaik notes that according to either hypothesis, "Jews are an assortment of tribes who accepted Judaism, migrated elsewhere, and maintained their religion up to this date and are, therefore, expected to exhibit certain differences from their neighboring populations." In other words, Jews are a distinct people, regardless of which hypothesis is correct. But because "Caucasus and Semitic populations are considered ethnically and linguistically distinct," the two hypotheses offer very different explanations for the origins of nearly 90 percent of Jews worldwide.
To test the two hypotheses, Elhaik and his team used genetic sequencing. I am no scientist and cannot comment on Elhaik's methodology or the validity of his findings. But according to Elhaik, his findings "support the Khazarian Hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry." Stating it another way, Elhaik writes that "Eastern European Jews are Judeo-Khazars in origin." Elhaik cites archaeological, historic, anthropological and linguistic studies that support this conclusion. Of his findings, Elhaik writes that "we hope that they will provide new perspectives for genetic, disease, medical, and anthropological studies."
But there may also be a political dimension to the Khazarian Hypothesis. The Jewish claim to the land of Israel -- including settlements in the "historic heartland" of Judea and Samaria (in what is now known as the West Bank) -- is premised at least in part on the argument that Jews settled and developed Israel and have maintained ties to Israel for more than 3,700 years. But if the vast majority of Jews can only claim a tenuous connection to the early Judeans, does this argument not lose some of its force?
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