Crackpots #66: It Had to Be Jew (Patreon)

This week's edition of Crackpots comes courtesy of Arielle Gordon. Arielle is a writer from Long Island, currently based in Brooklyn.

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“I can’t believe you haven’t heard of the Khazarian hypothesis,” Matthew said. He sounded genuinely shocked. “You’re telling me they didn’t teach you this? It’s your own people.” He explained to me that Ashkenazi Jews like myself weren’t descended from the 12 Tribes of Israel, but were a conquered Turkic group who converted to Judaism at the beginning of the 9th century. I asked if he wanted to go back to watching Beavis and Butthead Do America. “No,” he said. “It’s important you learn.” 

We were in his living room, splayed out in front of a 100-inch flatscreen on opposite sides of his sectional, cradling our respective tall boys (his, a Carlsberg; mine, Coors Banquet). We had been hooking up for maybe a month by this point. Matthew was an aspiring actor. His favorite movie was Rambo. He worked at the overpriced coffee shop near my apartment to support his passions and his cocaine habit. 

We first met earlier that fall, when he chided me for my (admittedly pretentious) order: “You think we fucking carry Orange Pekoe here?” As he bullied me, I made sure to stare directly into his eyes, cartoonishly wet and round, like my cat’s when he smells a mouse. We kissed for the first time exactly two weeks later, on the night of the 2022 midterms. We poured out a bit of our whiskey in memory of New York’s fallen congressional district; we tangled our limbs and watched Search Party instead of the electoral results. 

Matthew prided himself on his luddite tendencies, so foreign to my internet-addled brain. He would often go to work without his phone, whereas I felt anxiety any time I couldn’t feel the square outline of my iPhone in my back pocket. He didn’t own a computer. 

“Why would I need one?” he asked while I stared in awe, as if looking upon the last of a dying breed. 

I searched for a while. “Word processing?”   

Of course, in a more literal way, he had a massive computer, a SmartTV mounted to his wall that we stared at for hours every time we hung out. He showed me old YouTube videos of his long-defunct Providence skramz project; we aimlessly clicked through the Criterion Channel until we found a movie neither of us had seen. 

Occasionally, more nefarious images would poke through in the “recommended” section of Roku City: “Treat Her Like a Prostitute: 10 Ways to Mentally Dominate Women;” “Bucharest vs. Berlin: A Tale of Two Cities;” “Aliens: Truth REVEALED!” I asked if he heard about this Khazarian business from a YouTube video. 

“What’s wrong with that?” 

I looked back at him, surprised to feel my face get hot and my eyes well up with tears. “What, you’re crying now? Because I said you weren’t a real Jew?” He stood up and went into the bathroom, then unzipped his fly and started pissing without closing the door. “I can’t believe you weren’t taught this. You usually know everything.” 

Jewish genealogy is not something I would say I previously cared deeply about. I have one black-and-white photo of my great-great grandparents standing in a dark, dusty room in Belarus, a portrait taken for their children, who would never see them again after starting their lives in America. I gave my cat my great-great grandfather’s name: Naftali. But I didn’t spend much time looking at my pale skin and wondering if my direct ancestors once chilled in the Levant. Nor did I spend time interrogating why I found myself attracted to men like Matthew. Matthew said stuff all the time that made no sense—the week prior, he talked for ten minutes about moving to the “pristine” streets of Hungary before revealing that he had never heard of Viktor Orban. So why did his offhanded comment about a 9th century Turkic conversion make me cry? I felt compelled to do my own research.

The Wikipedia entry “Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry” is surprisingly long, and “conspiracy theories” is in the introductory paragraph. Ezra Pound apparently cared deeply about the issue, which he took up after reading a book called Facts Are Facts about the topic. The most recent original genealogical study on the topic had been roundly debunked by renowned scientists in the field. I breathed a sigh of relief: this was an open-and-shut antisemitism thing. I called Matthew and screamed into the phone, “It’s a conspiracy theory, of course it is!”

Privately, though, I still felt unsettled. It would hardly be the first time something foundational to my understanding of my religion proved to be a total lie. Zionist myths pervaded my childhood; at one time, I used to know how to configure my body in such a way that it suggested a rough map of Israel. I had the Israeli national anthem memorized; I occasionally welled up when we sang it in Hebrew school (the melody is quite haunting). 

My senior year of high school, graduating Hebrew school students were given three-hole punch binders filled with illustrated maps of Palestine, lines drawn on each to represent land acquisition over time.“Take these to college,” the lecturer instructed us. “If someone tries to tell you that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, show them these maps!” 

I forgot about the maps until students at my college began a very vocal Boycott Divest Sanction campaign, calling for a vote in the student body to back the initiative I attended the events and sat quietly as I learned about the nakba and the true toll of the 1967 “Six-Day War,” a conflict I had mostly known previously for David Rubinger’s photograph of IDF soldiers capturing the Western Wall. It hung proudly in many classrooms. I remembered how queasy I felt when I first learned where all the spare change that I put in the little blue and green Jewish National Fund tzedukah boxes was going. 

Afraid to again blindly, unwittingly support a genocidal ethno-national myth, I continued my search into the Khazar hypothesis. I logged onto JSTOR and started reading. One article in particular seemed to speak directly to my confusion: “Ashkenazi Anxieties” (I humbly suggest the title would also make a good band name). A historical analysis about debates on Jewish origin published in the Journal of the History of Biology, the paper argues that competing theories of Jewish genealogy are too irrevocably tied up in debates on the legitimacy of the Zionist state for experts to ever reach some kind of unbiased consensus. “The 1970s-1980s ‘controversy’ over competing models of Jewish genetic admixture has not been fully resolved even after the subsequent accumulation of DNA sequences,” it concludes. 

I called Matthew immediately, giddy to share all that I had learned. 

“JSTOR?” he said. “What’s that, like a store for Jews?” 

I reached out to the paper’s author, Elisa K. Burton, a professor at the University of Toronto specializing in life sciences in the modern Middle East. (She actually did her PhD thesis on that 2012 genetics study that Wikipedia had strongly suggested was debunked.) I wanted to know if she could tell me why my boyfriend, a lapsed Catholic from New Jersey, cared so much about all of this. Our interview, conducted via email, is below. 

Researchers you cite use words like "dubious," and on the opposing side, "legitimate," and "authentic," when debating the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry. Why is there such strong historical demand for an ethnic connection to this religion in particular?  

There are multiple factors behind the “ethnic” aspect of Jewishness, a significant one being that in recent centuries it has not been friendly to converts and so being Jewish is largely an inherited status (through the mother according to the rabbinate, through the father according to Karaites). Strictly speaking, this is not unique to Judaism—I’m currently researching the history of genetics on Zoroastrians/Parsis and there is a similar preoccupation with the religious/ethnic status of children of mixed marriages, etc. However, in my opinion, it has become irrevocably tied to the permanently linked problems of antisemitism and Zionism. Jewish identity was racialized through European antisemitism, and Zionism emerged directly from that context with the idea that Jews were a racial/ethnic nation that therefore needed a nation-state. Under the political logic of nation-states that still prevails today, the “legitimacy” of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state fundamentally relies on buy-in from Jews and non-Jews alike that Jewishness is not only about observing religious practices but also about inherited identity. It’s this inherited identity that, in the past, marked Jews for antisemitic discrimination, but also now enables Jews to access certain privileges (e.g. Israeli citizenship and right of return).

Beyond the anti-Zionist invocations of admixture hypotheses, there is a growing community of online content creators who invoke specifically the Khazarian hypothesis. Why does this particular hypothesis engage non-Jewish populations?

I think the Khazar hypothesis attracts attention because of its perceived relevance to Zionism and the legitimacy of Israel; I don’t believe it would be treated as so controversial otherwise. Many forms of ethnic nationalism are deeply invested in the idea of indigeneity as the basis for legitimate sovereignty over a given place. Zionists (and let’s remember there are many non-Jewish Zionists out there) have tried to use historical, archaeological, etc data to argue that Palestinians are not indigenous to Palestine and therefore don’t have a legitimate claim to a nation-state on that land; likewise anti-Zionists marshal similar kinds of evidence to argue that Jewish people are not indigenous to that land. Zionists who believe that Israel has a “right to exist” because Jews are a singular ethnic group with shared ancestry from the ancient inhabitants of Palestine therefore cannot consider the Khazar hypothesis as a neutral academic theory; they feel motivated to characterize it as inherently antisemitic. On the other hand, non-Zionists, or Zionists who have a different concept of the basis for Israeli sovereignty, are less threatened by the question of whether all Jews can trace their ancestry to Palestine, may be more open to thinking about this hypothesis.

How has the proliferation of at-home genetic testing changed the narrative about Jewish origins? When my aunt's 23AndMe results, for example, come back as "99.9% Ashkenazi Jewish," what does that really mean? 

I think it has unfortunately reinforced the problematic trend toward biological essentialism in Jewish identity. For more on this I’d refer you to Nadia Abu El-Haj’s excellent work on Jewish genetics, especially Chapter 4 of her book The Genealogical Science. As for what the “ethnic percentages” from ancestry websites really mean, it’s firstly easier to explain what they don’t mean: it doesn’t mean that 99.9% of your ancestors are Ashkenazi Jewish, in fact, this number has no relationship to the ethnic/religious background of any specific individuals within your family tree. It’s a number contingent on which genetic markers the company looks at, and how common those markers are within groupings the company has designated as “reference groups.” None of those markers are going to be diagnostic of a particular ethnic group; it’s a matter of relative frequencies (this is also why your results can change whenever the company updates its data). 

Basically it means that 99.9% of the genetic markers the company looked at in your DNA sample happen to be most common among people that reported their ancestry as Ashkenazi Jewish. The other 0.1% of markers are certainly also present in, say, 30% of Ashkenazi Jews, but maybe they appear in 40% of people reporting their ancestry as Scandinavian. So now according to 23andme’s output, you are 0.1% Scandinavian. Never mind that you don’t have a single Scandinavian in your family tree. (if this is confusing, I once recorded a podcast on this topic.)

Have you looked at all into genetic studies after the period you cover in this paper? I am specifically curious about your thoughts on the ongoing criticism of recent work by Eran Elhaik, and the validity of his methodologies.   

Oh yes, I was very interested in Elhaik when his work first came out in 2013 and wrote a bit about the media circus around him in my 2017 PhD dissertation. I recall thinking that the backlash against him in 2013-16 was entirely political, in fact, resoundingly similar to the events of the 1970s described in my article—some of the geneticists like Doron Behar who criticized him most harshly had previously mentioned the Khazar hypothesis years earlier in their own work, but after Elhaik’s publications, suddenly this hypothesis had to be strongly refuted. 

Personally, I am not a Zionist (I’m opposed to all forms of ethnic nationalism) and so I have more sympathy for Elhaik’s politics as he expressed in this article. As for the validity of Elhaik’s methods, I am not convinced they are really better or worse than those used by his critics; I don’t think this is a historical question that can be resolved by genetics. 

It’s worth noting that both Elhaik and some of his critics had (maybe still do) some financial skin in the game of ancestry testing. Michael Hammer and Doron Behar worked with Family Tree DNA, and Elhaik commercialized the algorithm he developed for companies called Prosapia Genetics and GPS Origins.