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By: Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal
Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal, historian, journalist and lecturer, is a graduate
of Cornell University and Columbia Law School. During the Second World War,
he served with the US Army in the Middle East. He later served with the
Department of State, and as a consultant to the American delegation at the
organising meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco.
Since 1947, he has been at the forefront in the struggle for a balanced US
policy in the Middle East. He is the author of several acclaimed books on the
Middle East, including The Zionist Connection. He now lives in Washington, DC.
On December 18, 1993 Dr. Lilienthal celebrated both his 80th birthday and the
40th anniversary of his first book, What Price 'Israel'? Dr Lilienthal, who
is a courageous anti-Zionist Jew, was joined by more than 200 guests who
travelled from all over the United States to attend. The following excerpt is
taken from this first book, What Price 'Israel'?
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Today, to trace anyone's descent to ancient Palestine would be a genealogical
impossibility; and to presume, axiomatically, such a descent for Jews, alone
among all human groups, is an assumption of purely fictional significance.
Most everybody in the Western world could stake out some claim of Palestinian
descent if genealogical records could be established for two-thousand years.
And there are, indeed, people who, though not by the widest stretch of
imagination Jewish, proudly make that very claim: some of the oldest of the
South's aristocratic families play a game of comparing whose lineage goes
farther back into 'Israel'. No one knows what happened to the Ten Lost Tribes
of 'Israel', but to speculate on who might be who is a favored Anglo-Saxon
pastime, and Queen Victoria belonged to an 'Israelite' Society that traced
the ancestry of its membership back to those lost tribes.
Twelve tribes started in Canaan about thirty-five centuries ago; and not only
that ten of them disappeared - more than half of the members of the remaining
two tribes never returned from their "exile" in Babylon. How then, can
anybody claim to descend directly from that relatively small community which
inhabited the Holy Land at the time of Abraham's Covenant with God?
The Jewish racial myth flows from the fact that the words Hebrew,
'Israelite', Jew, Judaism, and the Jewish people have been used synonymously
to suggest a historic continuity. But this is a misuse. These words refer to
different groups of people with varying ways of life in different periods in
history. Hebrew is a term correctly applied to the period from the beginning
of Biblical history to the settling in Canaan. 'Israelite' refers correctly
to the members of the twelve tribes of 'Israel'. The name Yehudi or Jew is
used in the Old Testament to designate members of the tribe of Judah,
descendants of the fourth son of Jacob, as well as to denote citizens of the
Kingdom of Judah, particularly at the time of Jeremiah and under the Persian
occupation. Centuries later, the same word came to be applied to anyone, no
matter of what origin, whose religion was Judaism.
The descriptive name Judaism was never heard by the Hebrews or 'Israelites';
it appears only with Christianity. Flavius Josephus was one of the first to
use the name in his recital of the war with the Romans to connote a totality
of beliefs, moral commandments, religious practices and ceremonial
institutions of Galilee which he believed superior to rival Hellenism. When
the word Judaism was born, there was no longer a Hebrew-'Israelite' state.
The people who embraced the creed of Judaism were already mixed of many races
and strains; and this diversification was rapidly growing...
Perhaps the most significant mass conversion to the Judaic faith occurred in
Europe, in the 8th century A.D., and that story of the Khazars (Turko-Finnish
people) is quite pertinent to the establishment of the modern State of
'Israel'. This partly nomadic people, probably related to the Volga Bulgars,
first appeared in Trans-Caucasia in the second century. They settled in what
is now Southern Russia, between the Volga and the Don, and then spread to the
shores of the Black, Caspian and Azov seas. The Kingdom of Khazaria, ruled by
a khagan or khakan fell to Attila the Hun in 448, and to the Muslims in 737.
In between, the Khazars ruled over part of the Bulgarians, conquered the
Crimea, and stretched their kingdom over the Caucasus farther to the
northwest to include Kiev, and eastwards to Derbend. Annual tributes were
levied on the Russian Slavonians of Kiev. The city of Kiev was probably built
by the Khazars. There were Jews in the city and the surrounding area before
the Russian Empire was founded by the Varangians whom the Scandinavian
warriors sometimes called the Russ or Ross (circa 855-863).
The influence of the Khazars extended into what is now Hungary and Roumania.
Today, the villages of Kozarvar and Kozard in Transylvania bear testimony to
the penetration of the Khazars who, with the Magyars, then proceeded into
present-day Hungary. The size and power of the Kingdom of Khazaria is
indicated by the act that it sent an army of 40,000 soldiers (in 626-627) to
help Heraclius of the Byzantines to conquer the Persians. The Jewish
Encyclopedia proudly refers to Khazaria as having had a "well constituted and
tolerant government, a flourishing trade and a well disciplined army."
Jews who had been banished from Constantinople by the Byzantine ruler, Leo
III, found a home amongst these heretofore pagan Khazars and, in competition
with Mohammedan and Christian missionaries, won them over to the Judaic
faith. Bulan, the ruler of Khazaria, became converted to Judaism around 740
A.D. His nobles and, somewhat later, his people followed suit. Some details
of these events are contained in letters exchanged between Khagan Joseph of
Khazaria and R. Hasdai Ibn Shaprut of Cordova, doctor and quasi foreign
minister to Sultan Abd al-Rahman, the Caliph of Spain. This correspondence
(around 936-950) was first published in 1577 to prove that the Jews still had
a country of their own - namely, the Kingdom of Khazaria. Judah Halevi knew
of the letters even in 1140. Their authenticity has since been established
beyond doubt.
According to these Hasdai-Joseph letters, Khagan Bulan decided one day:
"Paganism is useless. It is shameful for us to be pagans. Let us adopt one of
the heavenly religions, Christianity, Judaism or Islam." And Bulan summoned
three priests representing the three religions and had them dispute their
creeds before him. But, no priest could convince the others, or the
sovereign, that his religion was the best. So the ruler spoke to each of them
separately. He asked the Christian priest: "If you were not a Christian or
had to give up Christianity, which would you prefer - Islam or Judaism?" The
priest said: "If I were to give up Christianity, I would become a Jew." Bulan
then asked the follower of Islam the same question, and the Moslem also chose
Judaism. This is how Bulan came to choose Judaism for himself and the people
of Khazaria in the seventh century A.D., and thereafter the Khazars
(sometimes spelled Chazars and Khozars) lived according to Judaic laws.
Under the rule of Obadiah, Judaism gained further strength in Khazaria.
Synagogues and schools were built to give instruction in the Bible and the
Talmud. As Professor Graetz notes in his History of the Jews, "A successor of
Bulan who bore the Hebrew name of Obadiah was the first to make serious
efforts to further the Jewish religion. He invited Jewish sages to settle in
his dominions, rewarded them royally... and introduced a divine service
modeled on the ancient communities. After Obadiah came a long series of
Jewish Chagans (Khagans), for according to a fundamental law of the state
only Jewish rulers were permitted to ascend the throne." Khazar traders
brought not only silks and carpets of Persia and the Near East but also their
Judaic faith to the banks of the Vistula and the Volga. But the Kingdom of
Khazaria was invaded by the Russians, and Itil, its great capital, fell to
Sweatoslav of Kiev in 969. The Byzantines had become afraid and envious of
the Khazars and, in a joint expedition with the Russians, conquered the
Crimean portion of Khazaria in 1016. (Crimea was known as "Chazaria" until
the 13th century). The Khazarian Jews were scattered throughout what is now
Russia and Eastern Europe. Some were taken North where they joined the
established Jewish community of Kiev.
Others returned to the Caucasus. Many Khazars remarried in the Crimea and in
Hungary. The Cagh Chafut, or "mountain Jews," in the Caucasus and the
Hebraile Jews of Georgia are their descendants. These "Ashkenazim Jews" (as
Jews of Eastern Europe are called), whose numbers were swelled by Jews who
fled from Germany at the time of the Crusades and during the Black Death,
have little or no trace of Semitic blood.
That the Khazars are the lineal ancestors of Eastern European Jewry is a
historical fact. Jewish historians and religious text books acknowledge the
fact, though the propagandists of Jewish nationalism belittle it as pro-Arab
propaganda. Somewhat ironically, Volume IV of the Jewish Encyclopedia -
because this publication spells Khazars with a "C" instead of a "K" - is
titled "Chazars to Dreyfus": and it was the Dreyfus trial, as interpreted by
Theodor Herzl, that made the modern Jewish Khazars of Russia forget their
descent from converts to Judaism and accept anti-Semitism as proof of their
Palestinian origin.
For all that anthropologists know, Hitler's ancestry might go back to one of
the ten Lost Tribes of 'Israel'; while Weizmann may be a descendant of the
Khazars, the converts to Judaism who were in no anthropological respect
related to Palestine. The home to which Weizmann, Silver and so many other
Ashkenazim Zionists have yearned to return has most likely never been theirs.
"Here's a paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox": in anthropological
fact, many Christians may have much more Hebrew-'Israelite' blood in their
veins than most of their Jewish neighbors.
Race can play funny tricks on people who make that concept the basis for
their likes and dislikes. Race-obsessed people can find themselves hating
people who, in fact, may be their own racial kith and kin.
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