On Jun 26, 2010, at 11:51 PM, Shane Mage wrote: Whoops. I wrote "eastward" when I meant "westward." > > On Jun 26, 2010, at 11:27 PM, CeJ wrote: >> >> As I understand it, the now infamous Koestler "13th Tribe" thesis >> was >> really an attempt of a non-religious Zionist to show that the Jews of >> Europe largely had a European ethnogenesis... > > Clearly, not having read it, you misunderstand it. Koestler was > arguing that the Ashkenazis originated from Khazar Jews who fled > [westward] when the Mongols destroyed the great Khazar Jewish Empire > in > the Volga basin and northern Caucasus (the very name Ashkenazi derives > from a Biblical figure, Ashkenaz, who the 9th-century Babylonian > patriarch, Saadiah Gaon, identified as the ancestor of the Khazars). > It is generally held (including by Koestler) that the Khazars were > originally Turkic, but the territories that became the Khazar > heartland were those ("beyond the mountains of darkness") into which > Sargon II had deported the ten northern Israelite tribes more than a > millennium earlier and this is perhaps behind Saadiah's identification > of ther Khazars with Ashkenaz. Koestler, I think, was mainly > concerned with establishing his own ancestry among that Jewish Khazar > group which accompanied the Magyars (who were not Jews) in their > migration from Khazaria to the Pannonian plains. > > > Shane Mage > > "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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