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
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
