Who Does Palestine Actually Belong To?
Do Ashekenazi Jews have a “Right of Return”?
Who Does Palestine Actually Belong To?
Do Ashekenazi Jews have a “Right of Return”?
“‘Is it not absurd to turn the Hills of Judea, Samaria and the Galilee over to non-Hebrew ownership?’ Irgun Commander Menachem Begin asked UN representatives in 1947. ‘Do not the names themselves bear evidence to whom they rightfully belong?’”[1] Yet Begin, for all his talent as a terrorist, was wrong, for a number of reasons.
The most important reason was that he and his family, in fact all of his ancestors, had no relationship to Palestine whatsoever. He was born in Brest, in the Russian Empire of 1913. There can be no doubt whatsoever that he was a descendent of the Khazars, the famous “Thirteenth Tribe” as Arthur Koestler termed them.
Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1905, studied engineering in Vienna and left for Palestine in 1926, where he was forced to support himself with menial jobs.
By 1927 he had acquired a good post: running the Sekretariat of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party in Berlin. He became a journalist and tried, among other things, to persuade Menachem Begin to accept a two-state solution.[2] He suffered much, believed in many causes, and was repeatedly disillusioned. He became a famous writer, travelled the world and wrote “The Thirteenth Tribe” in 1976. It is the story of the Khazar Empire. The story of the Khazar Empire, Koestler wrote, was one of the cruelest hoaxes in history.
Koestler told of how the Khazars, who were of Turkish stock, created a Jewish state, known as the Khazar Empire, which once ruled between the Caucasus and the Volga. They “occupied a strategic key position at the vital gateway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, where the great eastern powers of the period confronted each other. It acted as a buffer protecting Byzantium against invasions by the lusty barbarian tribesmen of the northern steppes – Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, etc. – and, later, the Vikings and the Russians. But equally, or even more important both from the point of view of Byzantine diplomacy and of European history, is the fact that the Khazar armies effectively blocked the Arab avalanche in its most devastating early stages, and thus prevented the Muslim conquest of Eastern Europe… A few years later, probably AD 740, the King, his court and the military ruling class embraced the Jewish faith, and Judaism became the state religion of the Khazars.”[3]
After the destruction of their empire, in the twelfth or thirteenth century the Khazar tribes and communities migrated into “those regions of Eastern Europe – mainly Russia and Poland – where, at the dawn of the Modern Age, the greatest concentrations of Jews were found.”
Koestler concluded that “the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European – and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar – origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Ab raham, Isaac and Jacob.” Thus, for Koestler: “the term ‘anti-Semitism’ would become void of meaning, based on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims.”[4]
This narrative didn’t go down well in certain quarters and even today Wikipedia, that acme of “reliability”, employs the words: “thesis” and “hypothesis” when referring to the book.[5] This is despite the fact that Koestler’s narrative has long been proven fact and not fiction. The man who proved the case was Dr. Eran Elhaik, who, according to the web page of the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences of Sheffield University, which seems a safe enough source, got his BSc in Israel in 1999 and PhD in Texas at the University of Houston in 2009. He has been lecturing at the University of Sheffield since 2014.
Of himself he states: “My research is multidisciplinary and requires computational and statistical skills alongside epidemiological and mathematical skills. For example, in Elhaik (2013a) I designed a dedicated microarray for genetic genealogy, in Elhaik (2013b) I showed that the origin of European Jews is from the Khazars, in Elhaik (2014a) I dated the most ancient human Y chromosome known as ‘Adam’ Y chromosome, and in Elhaik (2014b) I developed the GPS tool that uses DNA to predict geographical origin of populations with an extreme accuracy.”[6] Rather touchingly he ends with the words: “I was nominated to the Sheffield Students’ Union Academic Award 2016 for ‘Best Personal Tutor’”. In reality he should have long been awarded a Nobel Prize and the fact that he hasn’t been says more about the corruption of the system and the consequent worthlessness of such prizes than anything else.
In his research article: “The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses” he tells of how there were once two competing theories: the “Rhineland Hypothesis”, which rested on the assumption that Eastern European Jews emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastward and the “Khazarian Hypothesis”, which assumed that Eastern Europeans were “descended from Judean tribes who joined the Khazars, an amalgam of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries CE and converted to Judaism in the 8th century…Following the collapse of the empire, the Judeo-Khazars fled to Eastern Europe.”[7]
Advances in modern technology and political changes made it possible to decide which of the two competing theories was correct: “Recent sequencing of modern Caucasus populations prompted us to revisit the Khazarian Hypothesis and compare it with the Rhineland Hypothesis. We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses — including principal component, biogeographical origin, admixture, identity by descent, allele sharing distance, and uniparental analyses — to compare these two hypotheses. Our 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.”[8]
Given the fact that: “Contemporary Eastern European Jews comprise the largest ethno-religious aggregate of modern Jewish communities, accounting for nearly 90% of over 13 million Jews worldwide”[9], this is not without significance.
In an article intended for the general public[10] he explained that, thanks to a genomic study of Ashkenazic Jews, it was possible to trace the genomes of more than 360 Yiddish and non-Yiddish speaking Ashkenazic Jews to four ancient villages in north-west Turkey, one of which had been abandoned in the mid-7th century AD. The ancient villages were clustered around the Silk Road and were called: Iskenaz, Eskenaz, Ashanaz, and Ashkuz. His conclusion was that “it is likely that these are the villages that mark the location of the lost lands of Ashkenaz”.
“Located on the cross roads of ancient trade routes, this region suggests that the Yiddish language was developed by Iranian and Ashkenazic Jews as they traded on the Silk Road from the first centuries AD to around the 9th century when they arrived in Slavic lands.”
“Putting together evidence from linguistic, history, and genetics, we concluded that the ancient Ashkenazic Jews were merchants who developed Yiddish as a secret language – with 251 words for ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ – to maintain their monopoly. They were known to trade in everything from fur to slaves.”
“By the 8th century the words ‘Jew’ and ‘merchant’ were practically synonymous, and it was around this time that Ashkenazic Jews began relocating from ancient Ashkenaz to the Khazar Empire to expand their mercantile operations.”
“This Jewish migration led to some of the Turkic Khazar rulers and numerous eastern Slavs living within the Khazar Empire to convert to Judaism so they didn’t miss out on the lucrative Silk Road trade between Germany and China.”
“But the demise of Khazaria due to continued invasions and finally the Black Death devastated this last Jewish Empire of Khazaria. This led to the Ashkenazic Jews splitting into two groups – some remaining in the Caucasus and others migrating into eastern Europe and Germany.”
Yet the story gets stranger still. If the Bible was Ben Gurion’s mandate, as he once claimed, it should have taken him to Arabia and not Palestine.[11] This is certainly the conclusion the amateur archeologist Ron Wyatt arrived at.
“In 1978 Ron Wyatt found chariot parts in the Gulf of Aqaba just off the Egyptian shore. At that time, he knew that Mt. Sinai had to be on the opposite shore. Since the Biblical account tells how the people arrived at Mt. Sinai after they crossed the Red Sea; and since the Gulf of Aqaba, which Ron knew to be the crossing site, separates the Sinai Peninsula (Egypt) and Saudi Arabia, there was no doubt as to the location of Mt. Sinai being in Arabia.”[12]
At roughly the same time a historian named Kamal Salibi, studying the place-names of non-Arabic origin in West Arabia, realized that he was looking at the place names of the biblical Old Testament.
According to Salibi, in his remarkable book: “The Bible Came From Arabia”, Judaism originated not in Palestine but in West Arabia, and the history of the Israelites, as narrated in the Hebrew Bible, ran its full course there and nowhere else.
“Nearly all the Biblical place-names I could think of were concentrated in an area approximately 600 kilometers long and 200 kilometers wide, comprising what are today Asir…and the southern part of the Hijaz.”[13]
This knowledge is not new. The Persian historian Al-Baladhuri wrote in the 9th Century: “The Jews of the Hijaz claimed that they had come to settle in Arabia during the last stage of the life of the Prophet Moses … the Jews claimed that they had been living in Yathrib (Medina) since about 1200 B.C. The second Jewish immigration, according to the Jews, took place in 587 BC, when Nebuchadnezzer, the king of Babylon, destroyed Jerusalem and dispersed the Jews throughout the world. The Arab Jews said that several of their tribes at that time had come to settle in Wadi al-Qura, Taima, and Yathrib.”[14] From other sources we know that Wadi al-Qura, Taima, and Yathrib were indeed settled by Jews.
The Jewish tribes in Arabia included the Banu Aws, Banu Harith, Banu Jusham, Banu Najjar, and Banu Qaynuqa, to name but a few.
The Banu Qurayza, Banu Nadir and the Banu Qaynuqa played a key role in the life of Muhammed. The close ties between Judaism and Islam are not accidental and are as old as Islam itself.
Some twenty Jewish tribes lived in the Hijaz (bordered on the west by the Red Sea, on the north by Jordan, on the east by Nejd and on the south by Asir in western Arabia) while Himyar (Yemen) was ruled by a dynasty of Jewish kings. Indeed: one of the kings, Yusuf, ordered all Christians in his kingdom to convert to Judaism and killed those who refused to do so.
[1] p.26 State of Terror, Thomas Suarez
[2] p. 37 Celia Goodman, ed. (CG), Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler’s Letters 1945-51
[3] ) pp.3-4 The Thirteenth Tribe, Arthur Koestler
[4] pp.4-5 Ibid
[5] The Thirteenth Tribe, Wikipedia
[6] The University of Sheffield
[7] The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Uncovering ancient Ashkenaz – the birthplace of Yiddish speakers, Did Ashkenazi Jews descend from ancient Turkey? Eran Elhaik, The Conversation UK, May 6, 2016
[11] p.24 State of Terror, Thomas Suarez
[12] https://www.wyattmuseum.com/mt-sinai.htm
[13] p.7 The Bible Came From Arabia, Kamal Salibi
[14] p.1 What Happened to the Jews of Medina, Ali Sina