By Tawfiq Abdul-Fattah, in Free Arab Voice
16 December 1997
Once upon a time in ancient Khazaria the entire kingdom converted to Judaism by decree from the king.
Arthur Koestler, a Jew born in 1905 in Budapest, writes that the Khazars who flourished from the 7th to the 11th century were in those bygone days a major political power. Their empire extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian and from the Caucasus to the Volga.
They were located “between two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium and the triumphant followers of Muhammad”. Since the world was then polarized between these two superpowers, representing Christianity (western style) and Islam, the Khazar empire representing a third force could only maintain its political and ideological independence by accepting neither Christianity nor Islam “for either choice would have automatically subordinated it to the authority of the Roman Emperor or the Caliph of Baghdad.”
Not wishing to be dominated by either of the two, the Khazar king “embraced the Jewish faith” in AD 740 and ordered his subjects to do the same. Judaism thus became the official state religion of the Khazars.
Obviously the king’s motives in adopting Judaism were purely political. “The bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin”, Koestler writes. “Their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus.” And he stresses: Continue reading ‘The Story of the non-Semitic Jews’
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