The Middle East Media Research Institute is an Israeli-US effort that deliberately mistranslates or otherwise misleads with a bias towards Israel. Assad didn’t doubt the existence of the Holocaust nor that 6 million Jews were killed. He did state two problematic things, however:
Speaking imprecisely on the extent to which Jews were targeted when trying to draw attention to the fact that Germans used the same concentration camps and mass death on an even larger number of non-Jews.
Delving into the Khazar origins hypothesis for Ashkenazi Jews, which was originally based on scanty evidence and is now an academic quagmire in terms of genetic evidence. The real reason for the hypothesis in these situations is to undermine the idea that European Jews are a diaspora from The Levant in order to undermine Zionist claims to the land, and to that end it’s a counterproductive overreach, as it rhetorically implies that a 2000-year-old diaspora would indeed have the right to settler-colonize and brutalize the populations living in “the homeland”.
Both are in the spirit of lazy narratives that flirt with antisemitism but are not the naked antisemitism that the headlines are falsely claiming.
Can you elaborate on you second bullet point a little? I’ve definitely not surveyed all academia on the Khazars but almost all criticism of the hypothesis I’ve been able to find is straight up hasbara talking points that simply treats the idea as a heresy without actually engaging in any sort of objective evidence based response. They even call it the Khazar Heresy even though the Jewish religion is indifferent to the “genetic” origins of Jewish groups across the world. The heresy is a heresy against the Zionist religion in that formulation. And from proponents of the Khazar idea, while I’ve seen them use it, in part, as a cudgel against the idea of a Jewish nation emerging from a specific gene pool in the Levant, arguing that this is actually a concession to Zionism seems like accepting Zionist bad-faith counter-framing (which is done by Zionists in bad faith).
The two chiefs issues are the pre-genetics claims and the genetics claims.
The pre-genetics claims were hand-wavy guesswork that antisemites latched onto rapidly and then some anti-Zionists reflexively used because they wanted to undermine Zionism (using a bad argument, as I argued). Israel’s conflation of Judaism and Zionism has often created situations in which there are varying degrees of antisemitism used against Zionism, ranging from explicit and raging antisemitism to casual tropes to simply mixing up Judaism and Israel when making criticisms. Several anti-Zionist groups, including some Soviet ones, latched on to the poor pre-genetics evidence and ran with it for political reasons, for example.
The genetics research is fraught. Comparative genetics is complex to analyze and very sensitive to the method used and assumptions made. There are scientists who claim that Ashkenazi Jewish population data suggests origins roughly in the area of Turkey to Palestine and this is generally the most popular interpretation. It certainly has decent evidence. At the same time, there are others who do see ambiguity there and markers that suggest ancestry near the caucuses as well, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Slavic. Ashkenazi Jews are certainly the result of diaspora, the only mystery is exactly where it started, so it’s challenging to tell the difference between “the diaspora started here” vs. “the diaspora moved here for a while and then continued”. From my perspective (and I do know a decent amount about the general methodologies), it seems like there are not enough seminal studies on the topic to properly challenge either hypothesis and it’s also difficult to disentangle from scientists’ biases, as the Khazar origins hypothesis has this history with antisemites and most people are unwilling to touch on it with ambiguous data. Some of the scientists who did, though, were Israeli, for what it’s worth.
the problem of evidence is for the Khazar hypothesis, there’s a handful of letters & coins showing the Khazar leaders practicised judaism, to what extent the whole state or people did is speculation. then it’s speculation and entirely undocumented how these “khazars” got so far west of where the khazar state had been, yet did not leave a much of a trace in the caucauses.
and then why did jews in eastern europe speak yiddish? that just has to be ignored or chalked up to… cultural imperialism? on the part of later migrants.
genetics are a) useless for determining anything but the most generalized impressions of migrations that have happened b) no “khazars” or descendant groups exist to test against. c) to the extent they’ve tested, it doesn’t support the theory
you’re right in that the theory has been used in various ways, both to try to create the impression of jewish indigeneity to russia (from russian jews), also to deny ashkenazi indigeneity to palestine (anti-zionism)—but it makes lots of people uncomfortable because after being mostly run out of academia for the above reasons, the people left talking about it are mostly antisemitic cranks making the case ashkenazi were ‘turkish’ interlopers in europe.
it doesn’t matter where the people doing apartheid in Palestine “actually” came from though, the problem is they’re doing apartheid. if groups of european jews had just moved to palestine like normal immigrants and not taken over and stolen everything, no-one would care if they believed their mythic ancestors were from there, right?
There is proven Jew presence in Germany from like III century and even the term Ashkenazi was used not long after destruction of Khazar Khaganate while there was entire centuries old Jewish organisation in Western Europe. Eastern European Jews are descended from mostly German Jews who were fleeing from the mass oppression and pogroms in XIII-XIV century.
Krymchaks and Karaites might be descendants of Khazar since last mentions of them are from Crimea and Krymchaks and Karaites do not speak Yiddish but a Turkic language, but it’s unclear.
In terms of non-genetic evidence it’s always been on shaky ground. Not necessarily disproven so much as it wasn’t established as likely in the first place.
In terms of comparative genetics analysis, the studies are fraught. The more typical hypothesis of origins near the Levant is the most popular and does have decent evidence. At the same time, some scientists, including Israeli ones, have reasonably entertained hypotheses of origins in the caucuses and have some amount of evidence. IMO there have not been good enough studies in general, they need to sample more populations, particularly different ethnic groups, and do proper work testing alternative hypotheses under different (appropriate) modeling methods. This research is also challenging because of the hypothesis being favored by antisemites. I probably wouldn’t work on the topic myself if I were in the field. There’s a lot of potential for negative outcomes without having rock-solid evidence and rock-solid evidence may be impossible.
I generally don’t think genetic research of ethnicity is very useful, it smells of calipers for mile and entire history already showed us it’s basically completely irrelevant. Culture and language research is much more useful.
Yeah, I would not like the precedent it would set.
The claim for this paper is that it is a necessary consequence of determining the medical nature of a condition which Ashkenazi Jewish people are at risk for. I read about the increased risk before, the author also lays it out well. In class we learned it was called a ‘founder effect’, when a population has it’s size greatly reduced and then there is less variation present.
The issue is any existing conditions, say an increased risk for a disease, propagate as the population grows and can become ‘fixed’. It isn’t as much of an issue for a large population, since if like, 10 out of 10 000 000 have the increased risk then it’s not too bad. If it’s 1 out of 10 000, that is troubling. When that population grows more and more people will continue to have the condition :(
Jewish people are discriminated against, that is rather obvious, finding out using diagnostic tools is helpful to anyone who might have an adverse condition and not know about it. Uh, unfortunately, medicine/research sucks and is chalkful of stuff like Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, whenever ethnicity or specifically people from a given geographic region are focused on…
Ashkenazi are a population which are studies a lot (there are a ton of population genetics papers, those are the ones I am familiar) because there is an established history and it is fairly accurate.
Hope this stuff isn’t used by anti-semites (obv it will, I’m hoping the harm is kept at a minimum…)
I just want to know a bit, jews are called children of Israel so Askenazi Jews are those who fled Israel after 70 AD after the 2nd temple destruction by romans? Or they existed before the 2nd temple period and so the period before existence of Torah?
That’s somewhat right, but it was gradual and did not happened in the next few centuries. Jewish diaspora existed even before 70AD, though indeed refugees fleeing from the Roman massacres speed up things. Most of Jews in diaspora lived in the Mediterranean shores, notably Egypt, but also in Italia, Iberia, Narbonensis, Greece, Dalmatia etc. where their presence is confirmed in I-II century already. Ashkenazi are decendant of those diaspora Jews that moved north together with romanisation (for example their first main community in Germany was in Cologne) and organising of states on that areas. Next was a period of opression in the kingdoms of Visigoths and Merovingian France where Jews were forced to convert or exiled, but after Charlemagne build his empire he gave Jews the merchant and financial privileges which stabilised their situation and allowed to develop into the medieval Ashkenazi in the next few centuries.
Judaism and Jews are a fascinating case, I always thought jews are a particular race which had a common origin in the middle East or ancient cannan. It’s also amazing that Jews also lived in Arabia during Muhammed’s period. But they got converted or exiled too.
Iirc there were also many judaistic Arabs in the time of Muhammad and before (even entire kingdoms, most notable of which was the Himyar kingdom in Yemen) and of course even after.
Yeah I don’t know how much it is true but it’s has been noticed that houthi movement has killed jews and exiled them. They were indigenous to Yemen and Arabs
The Middle East Media Research Institute is an Israeli-US effort that deliberately mistranslates or otherwise misleads with a bias towards Israel. Assad didn’t doubt the existence of the Holocaust nor that 6 million Jews were killed. He did state two problematic things, however:
Speaking imprecisely on the extent to which Jews were targeted when trying to draw attention to the fact that Germans used the same concentration camps and mass death on an even larger number of non-Jews.
Delving into the Khazar origins hypothesis for Ashkenazi Jews, which was originally based on scanty evidence and is now an academic quagmire in terms of genetic evidence. The real reason for the hypothesis in these situations is to undermine the idea that European Jews are a diaspora from The Levant in order to undermine Zionist claims to the land, and to that end it’s a counterproductive overreach, as it rhetorically implies that a 2000-year-old diaspora would indeed have the right to settler-colonize and brutalize the populations living in “the homeland”.
Both are in the spirit of lazy narratives that flirt with antisemitism but are not the naked antisemitism that the headlines are falsely claiming.
Can you elaborate on you second bullet point a little? I’ve definitely not surveyed all academia on the Khazars but almost all criticism of the hypothesis I’ve been able to find is straight up hasbara talking points that simply treats the idea as a heresy without actually engaging in any sort of objective evidence based response. They even call it the Khazar Heresy even though the Jewish religion is indifferent to the “genetic” origins of Jewish groups across the world. The heresy is a heresy against the Zionist religion in that formulation. And from proponents of the Khazar idea, while I’ve seen them use it, in part, as a cudgel against the idea of a Jewish nation emerging from a specific gene pool in the Levant, arguing that this is actually a concession to Zionism seems like accepting Zionist bad-faith counter-framing (which is done by Zionists in bad faith).
The two chiefs issues are the pre-genetics claims and the genetics claims.
The pre-genetics claims were hand-wavy guesswork that antisemites latched onto rapidly and then some anti-Zionists reflexively used because they wanted to undermine Zionism (using a bad argument, as I argued). Israel’s conflation of Judaism and Zionism has often created situations in which there are varying degrees of antisemitism used against Zionism, ranging from explicit and raging antisemitism to casual tropes to simply mixing up Judaism and Israel when making criticisms. Several anti-Zionist groups, including some Soviet ones, latched on to the poor pre-genetics evidence and ran with it for political reasons, for example.
The genetics research is fraught. Comparative genetics is complex to analyze and very sensitive to the method used and assumptions made. There are scientists who claim that Ashkenazi Jewish population data suggests origins roughly in the area of Turkey to Palestine and this is generally the most popular interpretation. It certainly has decent evidence. At the same time, there are others who do see ambiguity there and markers that suggest ancestry near the caucuses as well, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Slavic. Ashkenazi Jews are certainly the result of diaspora, the only mystery is exactly where it started, so it’s challenging to tell the difference between “the diaspora started here” vs. “the diaspora moved here for a while and then continued”. From my perspective (and I do know a decent amount about the general methodologies), it seems like there are not enough seminal studies on the topic to properly challenge either hypothesis and it’s also difficult to disentangle from scientists’ biases, as the Khazar origins hypothesis has this history with antisemites and most people are unwilling to touch on it with ambiguous data. Some of the scientists who did, though, were Israeli, for what it’s worth.
the problem of evidence is for the Khazar hypothesis, there’s a handful of letters & coins showing the Khazar leaders practicised judaism, to what extent the whole state or people did is speculation. then it’s speculation and entirely undocumented how these “khazars” got so far west of where the khazar state had been, yet did not leave a much of a trace in the caucauses.
and then why did jews in eastern europe speak yiddish? that just has to be ignored or chalked up to… cultural imperialism? on the part of later migrants.
genetics are a) useless for determining anything but the most generalized impressions of migrations that have happened b) no “khazars” or descendant groups exist to test against. c) to the extent they’ve tested, it doesn’t support the theory
you’re right in that the theory has been used in various ways, both to try to create the impression of jewish indigeneity to russia (from russian jews), also to deny ashkenazi indigeneity to palestine (anti-zionism)—but it makes lots of people uncomfortable because after being mostly run out of academia for the above reasons, the people left talking about it are mostly antisemitic cranks making the case ashkenazi were ‘turkish’ interlopers in europe.
it doesn’t matter where the people doing apartheid in Palestine “actually” came from though, the problem is they’re doing apartheid. if groups of european jews had just moved to palestine like normal immigrants and not taken over and stolen everything, no-one would care if they believed their mythic ancestors were from there, right?
Isn’t the Khazar hypothesis debunked long ago?
There is proven Jew presence in Germany from like III century and even the term Ashkenazi was used not long after destruction of Khazar Khaganate while there was entire centuries old Jewish organisation in Western Europe. Eastern European Jews are descended from mostly German Jews who were fleeing from the mass oppression and pogroms in XIII-XIV century.
Krymchaks and Karaites might be descendants of Khazar since last mentions of them are from Crimea and Krymchaks and Karaites do not speak Yiddish but a Turkic language, but it’s unclear.
In terms of non-genetic evidence it’s always been on shaky ground. Not necessarily disproven so much as it wasn’t established as likely in the first place.
In terms of comparative genetics analysis, the studies are fraught. The more typical hypothesis of origins near the Levant is the most popular and does have decent evidence. At the same time, some scientists, including Israeli ones, have reasonably entertained hypotheses of origins in the caucuses and have some amount of evidence. IMO there have not been good enough studies in general, they need to sample more populations, particularly different ethnic groups, and do proper work testing alternative hypotheses under different (appropriate) modeling methods. This research is also challenging because of the hypothesis being favored by antisemites. I probably wouldn’t work on the topic myself if I were in the field. There’s a lot of potential for negative outcomes without having rock-solid evidence and rock-solid evidence may be impossible.
I generally don’t think genetic research of ethnicity is very useful, it smells of calipers for mile and entire history already showed us it’s basically completely irrelevant. Culture and language research is much more useful.
Yeah, I would not like the precedent it would set.
The claim for this paper is that it is a necessary consequence of determining the medical nature of a condition which Ashkenazi Jewish people are at risk for. I read about the increased risk before, the author also lays it out well. In class we learned it was called a ‘founder effect’, when a population has it’s size greatly reduced and then there is less variation present.
The issue is any existing conditions, say an increased risk for a disease, propagate as the population grows and can become ‘fixed’. It isn’t as much of an issue for a large population, since if like, 10 out of 10 000 000 have the increased risk then it’s not too bad. If it’s 1 out of 10 000, that is troubling. When that population grows more and more people will continue to have the condition :(
Jewish people are discriminated against, that is rather obvious, finding out using diagnostic tools is helpful to anyone who might have an adverse condition and not know about it. Uh, unfortunately, medicine/research sucks and is chalkful of stuff like Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, whenever ethnicity or specifically people from a given geographic region are focused on…
Ashkenazi are a population which are studies a lot (there are a ton of population genetics papers, those are the ones I am familiar) because there is an established history and it is fairly accurate.
Hope this stuff isn’t used by anti-semites (obv it will, I’m hoping the harm is kept at a minimum…)
I just want to know a bit, jews are called children of Israel so Askenazi Jews are those who fled Israel after 70 AD after the 2nd temple destruction by romans? Or they existed before the 2nd temple period and so the period before existence of Torah?
That’s somewhat right, but it was gradual and did not happened in the next few centuries. Jewish diaspora existed even before 70AD, though indeed refugees fleeing from the Roman massacres speed up things. Most of Jews in diaspora lived in the Mediterranean shores, notably Egypt, but also in Italia, Iberia, Narbonensis, Greece, Dalmatia etc. where their presence is confirmed in I-II century already. Ashkenazi are decendant of those diaspora Jews that moved north together with romanisation (for example their first main community in Germany was in Cologne) and organising of states on that areas. Next was a period of opression in the kingdoms of Visigoths and Merovingian France where Jews were forced to convert or exiled, but after Charlemagne build his empire he gave Jews the merchant and financial privileges which stabilised their situation and allowed to develop into the medieval Ashkenazi in the next few centuries.
Judaism and Jews are a fascinating case, I always thought jews are a particular race which had a common origin in the middle East or ancient cannan. It’s also amazing that Jews also lived in Arabia during Muhammed’s period. But they got converted or exiled too.
Iirc there were also many judaistic Arabs in the time of Muhammad and before (even entire kingdoms, most notable of which was the Himyar kingdom in Yemen) and of course even after.
Yeah I don’t know how much it is true but it’s has been noticed that houthi movement has killed jews and exiled them. They were indigenous to Yemen and Arabs
By any chance do you have any spource for thus I have not heard it before?