The Jews Are Not A Race!
By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal
Excerpt from his book, What Price Israel? (1953)
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.
Dr. Alfred Lilienthal, an anti-Zionist Jew, is a graduate from
Cornell University and Colombia Law School. He is also a historian,
journalist and lecturer. He is the author of five books.
