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Hamas lied, Gaza rioters died' br Top IDF spokesma... (
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The far-reaching implications of this hypothesis may explain the great caution exercised by historians in approaching this subject -- if they do not avoid it altogether. Thus in the 1973 edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica the article "Khazars" is signed by Dunlop, but there is a separate section dealing with "Khazar Jews after the Fall of the Kingdom", signed by the editors, and written with the obvious intent to avoid upsetting believers in the dogma of the Chosen Race. [underscore supplied] 50
Abraham N. Poliak, Tel Aviv University's post-war Professor of Mediaeval Jewish History, wondered at "how far we can go in regarding this [Khazar] Jewry as the nucleus of the large Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. The descendants of this settlement," Poliak declares, "those who stayed where they were, those who emigrated to the United States and to other countries, and those who went to Israel -- constitute now the large majority of world Jewry. [emphasis supplied] 51 Some historians, such as Austrian Hugo Kutschera, assert that Eastern European Jewry was not part, but entirely of Khazarian origin. 52
Still further proof that the Jews of Eastern Europe had no origins in the West is Yiddish, the language commonly used by the Eastern Jews. Yiddish was, until the latter part of the twentieth century, a dying language. It is an amalgamation of several tongues, primarily Hebrew, and written with Hebrew characters, but which includes much of mediaeval German and components of other languages like Slavonic. The German elements incorporated into Yiddish have been clearly shown to have originated in the east of Germany where it joined the Slavonic regions of Eastern Europe. Yiddish is a sort of linguistic "sponge" in that it readily absorbs and incorporates whatever words or idiomatic expressions best suit its purpose. It would therefore naturally have become a cultural marker for whatever region in which it was spoken, absorbing the telltale indicators of dialect like a tattoo. 53
Another respected Austrian historian, Matisyohu Meises, questions, "Could it be that the generally accepted view, according to which the German Jews once upon a time immigrated from France across the Rhine, is misconceived?" Meises, who knew virtually nothing about the Khazars, was perplexed at the fact that no Yiddish linguistic roots whatever could be traced to Western Europe. He also noted that, inexplicably, there was a large geographical gap clearly delineating the Yiddish spoken by the Eastern Khazar transplants from any spoken in Western Europe. 54
"The evidence," Mr. Koestler nicely summates, "...adds up to a strong case in favour of those modern historians -- whether Austrian, Israeli or Polish -- who, independently from each other, have argued that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin. The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently westerly direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland and thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented mass-settlement in Poland came into being, there were simply not enough Jews around in the west to account for it; while in the east a whole nation was on the move to new frontiers." 55
With the overwhelming evidence that the modern Jewish population is of Khazar origin, Koestler remarks that this would clearly indicate 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 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." This conclusion would then logically render the epithet "anti-Semitism" "void of meaning," Koestler says.
The latter conclusion is a position Palestinian Arabs might well dispute with Mr. Koestler due to the fact that this revelation ironically places the modern Jew, currently occupying Palestine, in the unenviable position of, themselves, being anti-Semitic -- an historical mockery of somewhat amazing proportions. 56
But what, one may ask, became of the greater part of the population of "real Jews"?
Towards the close of the ninth century the Jewish settlements of Germany, who were nearly all of Semitic origin, had been virtually wiped out by the "mob-hysteria" that resulted from the First Crusade in 1096. The Encyclopedia Britannica on the Crusades vividly sets forth the mindset of the crusaders:
"He might butcher all, till he waded ankle-deep in blood, and then at nightfall kneel, sobbing for very joy, at the altar of the Sepulchre -- for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord?" 57
The Jews who found themselves in that "winepress" significantly assisted in their own demise. Like those of Massada who committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the armies of Rome, a great many of the Jews of the Rhineland and surrounding countries, when presented with the choice of baptism into "Christianity" or death at the hands of their captors, chose neither, opting for the Massada solution.
Imitating on a grand scale Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac, fathers slaughtered their children and husbands their wives. These acts of unspeakable horror and heroism were performed in the ritualistic form of slaughter with sacrificial knives sharpened in accordance with Jewish law. At times the leading sages of the community, supervising the mass immolation, were the last to part with life at their own hands. In the mass hysteria, sanctified by the glow of religious martyrdom and compensated by the confident expectation of heavenly rewards, nothing seemed to matter but to end life before one fell into the hands of the implacable foes and had to face the inescapable alternative of death at the enemy's hand or conversion to Christianity. 58
Of the German cities of Worms and Spires, being somewhat representative of the whole of Western European communities that were devastated by the Crusades, Salo Baron writes, "the total Jewish population of either community had hardly exceeded the figures...given for the dead alone". 59
The most common historical concept, before the modern revelation of the existence of Khazaria, was that the 1096 Crusade literally "swept like a broom" virtually the entire German Jewish population into Poland. This was an invention of apparent necessity because those historians could account by no other means for the inexplicably large population of Eastern European Jews. They concluded this in the face of the total absence of any historical account of a mass migration of Jews to eastern Germany and certainly not Poland.
By the close of the 1300s much of Western Europe was, for all practical purposes, completely empty of any perceivable Jewish population. What the Crusades failed to accomplish in the eradication of Western European Jewry the "Black Death" -- the Bubonic Plagues of the bacilli Pasteurella pestis -- virtually completed. Those Jews of that era suffered doubly; from the plague itself and from the proliferation of superstitious rumours that they were responsible for the disease by poisoning wells, just as they were blamed earlier for "the ritual slaughter of Christian children." This resulted in the burning alive of Jews in great numbers over the whole of Europe. 60 Later some of the Sephardic Jews of Spain immigrated northward, accounting for some of the smaller Jewish populations of Western Europe.
"Because of the long and varied history of the Jews," says the 2001 edition of World Book Encyclopedia, "it is difficult to define a Jew. There is no such thing as a Jewish race. Jewish identity is a mixture of religious, historical, and ethnic factors." Thus, those who might have truly claimed to be of the genealogy of Abraham and of true Semitic origin became extinct as a discernible race, being replaced by the white Khazars of the Transcaucasus, none of whose ancestors, as Benjamin Freedman phrases it, have ever placed a foot in the land of Palestine. This causes a serious problem with modern Christianity's infatuation with the Jews and their "return to their Homeland," begging the question: How can one return to a place where they have never been?