Tag: Jews

Jewish Khazars

Jewish Khazars

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Are Ashkenazi Jews descended from the Khazars? It’s a hot question. Many people, both Jews and non-Jews, have thought so, but nowadays it has become anti-Semitic to say it. I’m not exactly sure when it became taboo to question scientific research.

At one time, many years ago, I thought Arthur Koestler made a slam-dunk case for the Ashkenazi as descendants (primarily) of the Khazars (The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage, 1976). “Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland & formed the cradle of Western Jewry.”

Then, after more reading, I decided there is room for doubt.

Then I read Eran Elahik and was back onboard.

Back and forth.

It’s been a few years now. It feels like it’s time for me to re-visit this question, but I’m not making any headway.

Last time I jumped in, I was struck by one specific problem–no one is really sure how to resolve a basic problem with the DNA. There is no good proxy for the DNA of the ancient Khazars. Choose this group and evidence “proves” the Eastern European Jews must Khazars. Choose that group and clearly they are not. all this back and forth comes out of a problem with DNA.

That choice is grounded in politics, not science, no matter how dressed up it is.

Here’s an example that seems to be a well-considered dismissal. Until you notice all the strawman arguments and leaps of logic. I was looking for science, not diatribe.

The main argument against the Khazar Hypothesis is that if Jews are descendants of the Khazars then their occupation of Palestine is illegitimate. Anyone who believes it is trying to de-legitimize Israel, and is therefore anti-Semitic.

That strikes me as a particularly specious argument. I can see how it gets emotional play, but really, it’s already a stretch to think that Jews have enhanced rights to the territory their ancestors left 2 thousand years ago. You don’t need a link to the Khazars.

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Asser Levy in New Amsterdam

Asser Levy in New Amsterdam

by Justin Durand

Leading up to Thanksgiving, a post on Twitter reminded me of Steve Brodner’s 2013 piece on Asser Levy (?-1680). 

Asser Levy is the first documented Jew in North America, and his been called the Founding Father of American Jewry. He might have been one of the Jewish refugees from the Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil. He does not appear in surviving records of the Jewish congregation there, but the timing is right. He was in New Amsterdam (now New York) in 1654, when Peter Stuyvesant, the governor, opposed the settlement of Jews from Recife. Stuyvesant was eventually defeated by an appeal to the directors of the Dutch West India Company, Then, over the years, Levy routinely challenged policies that put Jews on a lower legal footing than gentiles.

I got interested in the Asser Levy story maybe a decade ago when I was looking at the idea my ancestor John Moses (c1616-1693) was Jewish. I’m skeptical but if he was Jewish he’d be the earliest known Jew in British North America. He was in Maine by 1638 as an apprentice to George Cleeve and Richard Tucker, of Casco Bay. His antecedents are unknown. I believe he entered Cleeve’s service about 1636 when Cleeve was in England on business. Some researchers believe Aaron Moses was a Sephardic Jew, originally from Amsterdam, but there is no evidence except what can be guessed from his name and the fact he named his son Aaron. The yDNA of his male-line descendants does not support a Jewish origin.

I was also interested in Asser Levy because–supposedly, according to Geni, who knows how reliable anything there is–I have Dutch ancestors who came to New York from Recife. Margrietje (Meyerinck) Wiltsie (1635-1704). Her mother’s mother is said to have been a native Brazilian woman.

Still another reason for my interest in Asser Levy is an idea among some of my relatives that the Howerys were originally Jewish. I thought for a time that if John Moses was Jewish that might account for the story. Another connection I once thought might contribute to that idea is a connection to Solomon Israel (c1710-1795), of Wilkes County, North Carolina. His grandson married Nancy Alloway, a 2nd great aunt of Grandma Bertha (Alloway) Howery. That wouldn’t give the Howerys a direct Jewish descent but might have been enough, I thought, to account for the vague idea of a Jewish connection.

Now, I attribute the “tradition” to a poorly understood British Israelitism, popularized by Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. I don’t doubt that there was also some influence from the brief popularity of Ray Banks’ theory that part of yDNA Haplogroup G2a (to which the Howerys belong) was spread through Europe by Radhanites (Jewish merchants).

Back to Asser Levy. Normally on Geni there would be one profile per person, and where there is a reasonable doubt or dispute about a person’s ancestry we deal with it by accepting only the proved information. That is, we don’t link the profile to any parents but instead describe the pros and cons in the notes for the profile. That’s not what we see there now (2019), nine years after I started work on his profile.

Because of the vanity of a particular curator we were pushed into a situation where Geni has two versions of Asser Levy. This curator needed to have a duplicate to serve as his ancestor’s brother. We were not able to resolve the dispute because he was not willing to consider the other, conflicting theories about Asser Levys’ origin and ancestry. He promised to work further, but never did.

Now, years later, both profiles are in the charge of a curator who recently argued aggressively that genealogical forgery and invention are not something to be concerned about or even necessarily corrected. Pam is not likely to fix it. And anyway, she’s more interested in Southerners gutting each other with hunting knives. Very colorful.

I’ve been wondering lately if I ought to pick up this project again. I’m still thinking but on the whole I think it’s probably a good lesson about the limits of collaborative genealogy.

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Jews in the New World

Jews in the New World

by Justin Durand

An article in The Atlantic caught my attention. We’re going ’round again with conversos and crypto-Jews, and once again the fantasy is just as stronger or stronger than the proved reality.

In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered all Jews in Spain to convert to Catholicism or leave the kingdom. Those who converted became known as conversos. Some of them continued to practice Judaism in secret, and even if they didn’t, they were often suspected of it. The functional result of this suspicion was that many conversos took pains to hide their Jewish ancestry.

Ferdinand and Isabella commissioned the first voyage of Christopher Columbus the same year they expelled the Jews. Two grand narratives in the same year. The temptation to link them is almost irresistible.

The popular story is that Columbus himself was a Jew looking for new homeland, and the American Southwest is full of crypto-Jews who are descendants of conversos driven further and further north as the territorial government solidified its hold.

Here in Colorado we have a native Hispano population that goes back to the early days, before the Anglo-American conquest. One of my step-mothers belonged to such a family. It’s not uncommon.

What we’ve seen just in the course of my lifetime is that Hispanos throughout Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas increasingly claim Jewish ancestry. In some circles the stories have reached a saturation point where no one doubts them anymore. They are taken at face value. In fact, there’s now a special term for them — the anusim, the one who were forced.

The modern fashion for finding crypto-Jews in the American Southwest seems to have started with Stanley Hordes in the mid-1980s. As New Mexico State Historian he heard stories that could be broadly interpreted as pointing to Jewish customs. He became convinced there was a bigger story there. After he left his job he began promoting the idea that conversos made their way to the New World, where they were able to practice Judaism in secret for 400 years. (Barbara Ferry and Debbie Nathan, “Mistaken Identity? The Case of New Mexico’s “Hidden Jews” in The Atlantic (Dec. 2000)).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the story exploded in popularity. Now there’s even a Society for Crypto-Jewish Studies. But were they really crypto-Jews? There’s a great deal of doubt. Certainly, the Inquisition was looking for crypto-Jews. About 100 were executed in Mexico, and many more were investigated, including a governor of New Mexico.

Many experts now believe Hordes misinterpreted the stories he was hearing. What he thought were survivals of Judaism might have come instead from Catholic converts to Protestant churches that emphasize Jewish practices. The most popular of these seems to have been the Seventh-Day Adventists, who observe the Sabbath on Saturday, practice Jewish dietary restrictions, celebrate certain Jewish holy days.

To be continued…

Ancient Israelites

Ancient Israelites

by Justin Durand

If you live long enough everything you learned as a child will change. Or at least that’s the way it feels.

When I was growing up in the 1960s in Utah and Nevada, I thought we were all pretty clear about the Jews and Palestinians. They were both descended from the Israelites in the Bible. The Jews were the ones who went into Exile. The Palestinians were the ones who stayed behind. And the Mormons, so they said, were descendants of the 10 Lost Tribes. I wasn’t all that clear on the chronology, but I knew the basic outline. 

Then there was the 1967 War. I remember a week of suspense and high emotion. My parents thought the Arabs would win. Everyone at church thought the Arabs would win. It was going to be a disaster. It changed my understanding of history. That’s when I became clear to me that the Mormons weren’t really Jews, the Palestinians weren’t really Jews, and (for what it’s worth) that the Jews weren’t Christians.

Flash forward a few decades. Sometime in the late 1970s I ran into Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage (1976). Koestler’s idea was that modern European Jews are broadly descended from the Khazars, a Turkish tribe that is said to have converted to Judaism in the 8th century. A controversial theory indeed.

Now, here is Shlomo Sand arguing:

“Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple [in 70 AD]. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.

“Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea.”

That seems plausible to me. I have much more to say on this subject but it will have to be spread across several posts.

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Revised to add and revise links.