Comments on: Ashkenazi Jews are probably not descended from the Khazars

By: Joe Q.

Joe Q. — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:57:31 +0000

… that is, unless one argues that the Khazars (at least those who were Judaized) spoke a Gothic language that later evolved into Yiddish. Clearly I’m neither a historian nor a linguist.

By: Joe Q.

Joe Q. — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:21:04 +0000

Interesting stuff on the origins of the Khazar language and of Yiddish, but to me at least, the question I posed in post #5 above still stands — i.e. how one could defend the theory that the Turkic-speaking Khazars were the major ancestors of modern Ashkenazi Jews (as many still believe) when the Ashkenazi language contains so few identifiably Turkic words (and those it does contain seem to have come through the intermediacy of surrounding Slavic languages).

By: Onur

Onur — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 13:44:15 +0000

There is no certainty about the original language of the Khazars. It is certain that the Khazar language is a Turkic language. What is not so certain is to which of the two primary branches of the Turkic language family (Common Turkic and Oghuric) it belongs. The available evidence on the Khazar language seems to favor the Oghuric (Lir Turkic) hypothesis more than the Common Turkic (Shaz Turkic) hypothesis. The best guess, based mostly on the few Khazar names that have been preserved, is that they spoke a language belonging to a branch of Turkic which includes Hunnic and modern Chuvash. Agree on that (read above).

By: Charles Nydorf

Charles Nydorf — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:21:45 +0000

@Joe Q
There is no certainty about the original language of the Khazars. The best guess, based mostly on the few Khazar names that have been preserved, is that they spoke a language belonging to a branch of Turkic which includes Hunnic and modern Chuvash.

By: Kevin Brook

Kevin Brook — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 06:06:17 +0000

@Joe Q, I address this issue in Chapter 10 of the second edition of my book “The Jews of Khazaria”. The Ashkenazi Jews migrating east into the Belarusian region encountered a small population of Slavic-speaking Jews. The suggestion is that these Slavic-speaking Jews had been speaking Slavic for several hundred years and had long since abandoned Turkic but that their distant ancestors did speak Turkic and Greek and came from Khazaria and the Byzantine Empire respectively. Some of the early Slavic Jewish families of the region married the incoming Ashkenazim and presumably contributed some of the Slavic elements to Yiddish language and culture.

By: Joe Q.

Joe Q. — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 23:36:08 +0000

@Charles Nydorf, what language did the Khazars speak? A Germanic language or a Turkic language?

By: Charles Nydorf

Charles Nydorf — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 18:55:30 +0000

@Joe Q
Abraham Polak, the Israeli historian who published “Khazaria: History of the a Jewish Kingdom in Europe” did address the linguistic question. He suggested that the earliest Yiddish was based on Crimean Gothic rather than German. While I do not agree with Polak’s general thesis, I count myself among the small minority of linguists who agree that Yiddish ultimately derives from Gothic. (I present evidence for this on my blog GothicYiddish.blogspot.com)

By: Joe Q.

Joe Q. — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:50:58 +0000

One issue that has always troubled me about the “Khazar hypothesis” is the seemingly complete lack of linguistic evidence supporting it. If Ashkenazi Jews originate from Turkic tribes, why do they speak the street-language of ca. 11th-century Rhineland, lightly infused with Hebrew and Slavic loan-words but with basically no Turkic content at all?

By: Charles Nydorf

Charles Nydorf — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:42:20 +0000

A culturally distinct community of Ashkenazic Jews is first documented in the central Rhineland (Speyer, Worms and Mainz) around 1000. This community had older roots in Jewish communities in Austria and Bavaria as well as Saxony that went back as far as about 800. The earlier history of German Jewry is obscure. Rhenish Jewry also had close connections to the Jewish communities of northern France.
After about 1400 and especially between 1500 and 1600 there was a significant settlement of Ashkenazic Jews in the Kingdom of Poland and the adjoining Duchy of Lithuania. This settlement was mostly fed by immigration from Germany and the Czech lands. Older Jewish communities in these eastern European lands were absorbed by the much larger stream of central European Jews.
In my opinion, Khazaria flourished too late to have had a formative cultural influence on Ashkenazic Jewry. However, Jewish communities on the north shore of the Black Sea which had existed at least since the first century did have a major influence on early German Jewry. While some of these communities came under the sway of the Khazars from time to time they already had their own cultural identity which was well established before the rise and partial Judaization of the Khazars.

By: qohelet

qohelet — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 08:29:07 +0000

I also think the Haplogroup Q1b as Khazar smoking gun point is problematic (eastern R1a less so)—it seems to have a distribution just as Middle Eastern as Central Asian, and occurs at a significantly higher frequency than the East Asian autosomal component.

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 07:18:20 +0000

similar to the Magyar and Bulgarian states.

no, i don’t think similar in magnitude. the bulgars and magyars placed themselves atop dense agglomerations of farmers. the khazar polity was part of greater turkestan, and also received fresh infusions of populations from the east over its history. from what i recall reading leo the khazar’s mother was of distinctive enough physical appearance as well. finally, there are claims that the judaicization of the khazars occurred disproportionately among its elite (with vast numbers of christians, muslims, and shamanists being more likely to be of vassal peoples). this would point to greater, not lesser, mongoloid element to the judaized segment.

By: Dienekes

Dienekes — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 07:05:46 +0000

John Novembre found a recent growth rate of 1.7% over a sample of mostly European people, which is higher than previous estimates that overlooked rare variants.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/08/1000-genomes-project-community-meeting.html

But the smoking gun for me is a simple one: East Asian ancestry. The Khazars were Turkic, and as such they would have had substantial proportions of East Asian ancestry. This is evident in the modern Chuvash, who have had a thousand years to admix with surrounding Slavic populations (and have).

Ashkenazi Jews do have about 1% East Eurasian ancestry quite consistently. We can also probably assume that the Khazar state was formed on the basis of a Turkic population but also of a native element, similar to the Magyar and Bulgarian states. So, depending on how much East Eurasian there was in them, there is some room for Khazar ancestry, although probably a minority element; and this would probably make sense, because the Jewish Khazars can’t have simply disappeared from history (so many other Jewish communities around the globe have proven resilient to absorption).

The most definitive answer to these questions can be given by using dense genotypic or even full genome data, a global dataset, and a method like that of Graham and Coop that can estimate the date of admixture.