The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage

This book traces the history of the Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. 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. To the general reader the Khazars, who flourished from the 7th to the 11th century, may seem infinitely remote. Yet they have a close & unexpected bearing on our world which emerges as Koestler recounts their fascinating history round about the time that Charlemagne was Emperor in the West. The Khazars' sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga. They were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa & into Spain. Thereafter the Khazars found themselves in a precarious position between two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium & the triumphant followers of Mohammed. As Koestler points out, the Khazars were the 3rd World of their day, & they chose a surprising method of resisting both the Western pressure to become Xian & the Eastern to adopt Islam. Rejecting both, they converted to Judaism. The 2nd part of this book, "The Heritage", speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars & their impact on the racial composition & social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it's advanced. Yet should this theory be confirmed, the concept of anti~Semitism would become void of meaning, since, as he writes, it's based "on a misapprehension shared by both the killers & their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated."