DNA Consultants Home of the DNA Fingerprint

DNA Consultants' fourth Jewish marker, Tatar/Khazar, has been renamed Jewish IV, bringing it into line with European, Asian and Sub-Saharan African marker groups. All these populations have four markers in acknowledgment of their complexity, age and diversity.

Native American has only two markers.

Jewish IV can be expected to be more sensitive following the addition of Altai Turkic, Caucasus, Southern Russian and Khazak population data to the company's computer program atDNA.

The four Jewish markers may be described as follows:

JEWISH I. This is the most common of the three markers. It can occur without known Jewish ancestry for a variety of reasons including an ancestor’s conversion to Christianity during the centuries of persecutions against Jews in Europe. Its frequency is highest in Poles, Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians and Slavic peoples who intermarried with Ashkenazi Jews. It also appears in Spanish, Portuguese and Moroccan Jews (Sephardim).

JEWISH II. This marker is the strongest. It is found in Jewish families who have intermarried with other Jews down through the centuries. It is characteristic of Ashkenazi Jews.

JEWISH III.  This marker is an indication of Middle Eastern roots. Preserved by Jews, it is also borne by Kurds, Syrians, Arabs, Berbers, Basques, Turks, Greeks, Italians and other populations from the ancient world.

JEWISH IV. A marker indicative of Tatar or Khazar heritage. Khazars were a Central Asian people of Turkic, Hunnish and Iranian elements that arose in the Caucasus region. After converting to Judaism in the early Middle Ages, they moved westward into Russia and the Ukraine under pressure from Islam, eventually becoming a large component of Eastern and Central European Jewry. Many Ashkenazi Jews now find they have some Khazar (or intermingled Tatar) ancestry.

As can be seen, these divisions reflect the three major convert populations of Judaism, Sephardim, Ashkenazim and Khazars (often referred to as "the thirteenth tribe") in addition to the original Middle Eastern Israelites and related people of the Bible (Jewish III), which forms the core genetic element of solidarity.

Khazar rabbis.

Jewish DNA is full of controversies and the journalist Jon Entine shies away from none of them in this bestselling compendium. Interesting for our readers may be to note where he falls out on some of the more vexed issues after taking the trouble to interview genetic news makers such as Karl Skorecki ("Genes of Old Testament Priests") and Father William Sanchez, the cause celebre for New Mexico crypto-Jews.



Is there a Jewish "race"? That is probably not the right word, but yes, writes Entine, there is definitely a Jewish ethnicity that has been been preserved in exile from the beginnings of Judaism in the Middle East over 3,000 years ago. Even Ashkenazi Jews are, genetically speaking, more similar to themselves and Middle Easterners than they are to Czechs, Poles and other Central and East European neighboring populations.

Is the Bible a true and accurate history of the Jews? No, for one thing, events in the Old Testament are corroborated by only a handful of contemporary records, including one Egyptian document and one Assyrian proclamation. The early books were rewritten several times, most famously by the Patriarch scribe Ezra. The Jews returning from Babylonian Exile burnished the existing scriptures and introduced political themes that put the Northern Kingdom in a bad light. The word "Jew" was not actually used of the inhabitants of ancient Israel until around 520 B.C.E., when the "battered capital city, Jerusalem, surrounded by a scattering of towns" (p. 107) was called Yehud, the Aramaic name of a new province in the Persian Empire. 

Do the Samaritans retain the closest genetic resemblance to Abraham's descendants? Here is what Entine writes:

The scientists speculate that not only are today's Samaritans likely descended from the Israelites, they may be the ancestral remnants of a breakaway group of Jewish priests that did not go into exile when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. Instead, these Cohanim may well have stayed, "but married Assyrian and female exiles relocated from other conquered lands, which was a typical Assyrian policy to obliterate national identities." It may just be that the tiny clan of Samaritans are a rare surviving branch of the ancient Israelites.

Among Entine's sources are Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, an Israeli geneticist who began studying Samaritan DNA when the population had dwindled to only a few families in the 1950s. Other authorities interviewed include: 

Karen Avraham (deafness in Jews), Doron Behar (Jewish founding mothers), Neil Bradman (Lemba Jews), Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (Stanford's grand old man of DNA), Jared Diamond, David Goldstein (Jewish diseases), Michael Hammer (Y chromosomes), Mary-Claire King (disease studies), Jonathan Marks (critic), Tudor Parfitt (African and Indian Jews) and Mark Thomas (Cohanim).

What happened to the ten Lost Tribes? Entine adopts a wry and caustic attitude toward this subject, beginning his chapter "Wandering Tribes" with a piece on the Worldwide Church of God, a Pasadena, California sect founded by an ex-advertising agent, Herbert W. Armstrong, in the early 1930s. Armstrong was a proponent of British-Israelism, the belief that England is the heir to ancient Israel, the tribe of Ephraim having settled in Britain and the word "British" being derived from the ancient Hebrew word beriyth, which means covenant. "When Armstrong died in 1986, the WWCG claimed more than 150,000 members and an annual budget of $130 million" (p. 130). 

Are Ashkenazi Jews really Khazars (i.e. non-Semitic)? Their genetic mix contains some Turkic elements from the Khazars, but even the Khazars were not 100% Turkic. Entine does not believe in the mass conversion portrayed in works such as Judah Halevi's medieval account The Kuzari: A Book of Argument in Defense of a Despised Religion. Following the author Kevin Brook ("not a formally trained historian but an impressively self-taught scholar...creator of the Web site khazaria.com," p. 199), Entine says "the number of Khazarian Jews probably numbered no more than 30,000 out of a total population of 100,000, including a few thousand nobles and royalty" (p. 201).

Do you have to have a Jewish mother to be Jewish? Entine investigates this ruling very thoroughly and shows that Judaism was spread primarily by men with Middle Eastern roots who married local women of non-Semitic ancestry who converted to the husband's religion. The Jewish mother criterion came about in rabbinical times under the influence of Roman law. In Biblical times, Jewishness always came from a Jewish father. 

Is there an "intelligence gene" among Ashkenazi Jews? Yes, it emerged in the age of the ghetto when survival selected for males who could earn a livelihood with their wits rather than hands or bodies.

Having touched on these questions, I would like to point out that many of the solutions are rather superficial. Entine's research is not very deep or wide ranging. Nowhere in the chapter on mass conversions does he speak about the Babylonian principality of Narbonne in the South of France during Carolingian times. His treatment of Sephardic Jews is meager. There are other limitations in the scope of the work, but in general, Abraham's Children is to be recommended as a solid, reliable, seemingly effortless account of a subject on which blood, sweat and tears have been spilled on every page in the past. That is no small feat.

Ashkenazi Jews May Have Founded Israel,

But Hebrew-Speaking Khazars Created Ashkenaz

Yes, the Khazars spoke Hebrew. It was the official language of the medieval kingdom, just as it is today in Israel. That is one of the surprising revelations of a book titled The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv history professor Shlomo Sand, who devotes half a chapter to the “strange empire in the East” (London:  Verso, 2009).

Judaism has not always been a closed society. During all but the last four or five centuries of its existence, it has been a proselytizing (and stabilizing) force in world events. Great states like the now-forgotten Khazaria played a role in the balance of powers and destiny of world civilization. The policies of the Kagan and his viceroy the Bey were praised everywhere for creating a prosperous, multi-ethnic, multi-faith state that held sway over the lives of millions for five centuries (700-1200).

Out of the Mists of Time

In an older book, Catastrophe (New York:  Ballatine), David Keys pursues a wider theme. He also has a chapter on Khazaria, “The Jewish Empire.” In it, after reviewing what we know about the medieval state, he concludes:  “The Khazar empire prevented the westward spread of Islam. If it had not been for the military might of the empire, Islam would likely have rolled west into pagan eastern Europe and possibly even into pagan Scandinavia in the eight and ninth centuries A.D.” He postulates that the Vikings could well have become Muslim, as well as Poland, Hungary, Romania, eastern Austria, the Czech and Slovak lands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Danelaw, the Viking state that emerged in eastern England.

“If the Khazar empire had not prevented Islamic expansion, it is even possible that the Normans (originally Vikings from Denmark) might have already been Muslims for two hundred years by the time they conquered England in 1066. What’s more, if the Arabs had occupied what is now the Ukraine and Russia [rather than the Khazars, who founded Kiev, Russia’s first capital], a Viking people known as the Rus would never have been able to push south and east from the Baltic to establish Russia” (p. 98).

An “investigative archeologist,” Keys attributes the rise and spread of the Khazar state to a devastating volcanic explosion in Java in 535 that caused worldwide darkness, crop loss, famine, droughts, floods, migration of peoples and destabilization of regimes. Among the losers in what has passed into history as the Dark Ages were the Byzantines, Britons, French, Spanish, south Arabs, Tang Chinese, Teotihuacan and Peruvians. The winners were Avars, Huns, Koreans, Japanese, Toltecs, Incas, Mohammedans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Visigoths. The global disaster had far-reaching effects that formed the modern world.

Sand is a professor in the department of European history (separated, curiously, from “Jewish” history in his country, Israel) and is concerned, as all historians are, with books. On the basis of records and written accounts, he reveals Khazaria’s rise as no opportunistic accident to adorn a schoolboy’s tale but as a historical phenomenon central to the formation of world Jewry. What Sand and Keys have in common is their iconoclastic, multi-disciplinary approaches. Independently, they assign a prominent role to Khazaria in world history. Both attack taboo subjects with relish and finesse and are soundly ignored, no doubt, in the balkanized institutional world of learning.

Physical Evidence in Genes

Sand was apparently unaware of Keys or the global catastrophe of 525, but Keys has an excellent genetic summary of the heritage of the Khazars, one that is consistent with the latest research into the unity and diversity of the Jewish people(s).

“The Jewish empire’s other legacy was the creation of a large pool of Jews of ethnically non-Jewish origin who subsequently became a major part—perhaps even the numerically dominant part—of northeast European Jewry and subsequently of world Jewry,” Keys writes (p. 99). He goes further and substantiates and characterizes the convert origin of the Ashkenazi community in the ascendancy in modern Israel and the United States.

“This group, according to tradition, comprises the majority of the descendants of the ancient Israelite tribe of Levi—people who today still bear the name Levi or Levy. Significantly, it does not include a Levite subgroup—the Priests themselves—who often have the name Cohen. . . . This genetic marker does not even show up among the Cohens (descendants of the ancient Israelite Chief Priests)—but only among the descendants of Assistant Priests [Levites]. And then only within Ashkenazi (northern European) Jewry . . . . If some top Khazars were adopting Cohenic Levitical status (i.e., Chief Priest status), then it is more than likely that others—a larger number—were adopting ordinary Levitical status (i.e., Assistant Priest status). Adoption of Cohenic or ordinary Levitical status by converts was and is expressly forbidden by rabbinical law, so the Khazars had to develop a mythic national history that gave them the right to Levitical status” (p. 100).

Kaftans and Yarmulkes

Both Keys and Sand write of the revealing role of Yiddish, the lingua franca of medieval European Jewry and first language of 80% of the settlers in the modern-day Land of Israel. They agree that Yiddish, even though it has a medieval German base, has more elements that are Slavic, Romance, Hebrew, Aramaic and even Turkic and is more accurately to be regarded as the result of a relexification process by originally mixed Sorbs, Magyars, Khazars and others, not as the dialect of west German or Rhineland Jews. In conventional Jewish teaching, Yiddish is regarded as a prestigious import from the Rhadanite and other Romano-Frankic Jews (who were Judean merchants under the Romans, according to most, hence retaining the desired link to ethnic origins in the Middle East). In the new view, Yiddish loses a lot of its special historical claims and becomes simply a language of convenience in the polyglot Khazar domain of former times.

The two books attribute also a superabundance of anthropological characteristics of Ashkenazi Jews to Khazar predominance, including shtetls (townlets), silk kaftans, fur headdresses, naming individuals after Jewish holidays (we have an Aunt Hanukkah and Uncle Pesach in our family tree) and innumerable place-names in Eastern Europe. Finally, Sand notes that the word yarmulke is derived from a Turkic word (p. 247).     

Although the “Khazar thesis” is largely ignored or silenced by Israeli leaders and Jewish scholars, it is unlikely that the rulers of the modern state of Israel will make any constructive impact on the course of world events on the scale of Khazaria. Jews should study Khazaria's intellectual and international model of statecraft instead of the tired and chauvinistic histories of nineteenth-century Zionists. As Sand says, “Why not begin to dream its future afresh, before it becomes a nightmare?”