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The Khazar theory of Ashkenazi ancestry is a hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Khazars - a multi-ethnic collection of Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic Khanate in what is now Southern Russia, extending from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. The theory relies on some Middle Ages' sources such as the Khazar Correspondence, according to which at some point in the 8th-9th centuries, the ruling elite of Khazars was said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism. The scope of the conversion within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain, and the evidence used to tie the Ashkenazi communities to Khazars by descent is exiguous and subject to conflicting interpretations.〔()〕〔()〕 Those who have argued in support of the theory use a variety of arguments from genetic hypotheses to inferences from linguistic evidence, and historical records and archaeological data. In the late 19th century, Ernest Renan and other scholars speculated that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe had their origin in Turkic refugees that had migrated from the collapsed Khazarian Khanate westward into the Rhineland, and exchanged their native Khazar language with the Yiddish language while continuing to practice the Jewish religion. The Khazar-Ashkenazi hypothesis came to the attention of a much wider public with the publication of Arthur Koestler's ''The Thirteenth Tribe'' in 1976. This theory has had a complex history, within and beyond Judaism. Major scholars have either defended its plausibility or dismissed it as a pure fantasy. It has also been seized on at times by antisemites and anti-Zionists for various purposes to argue for the idea that Ashkenazi Jews have no ancestral connection to ancient Israel. The theory had been received with scepticism or caution by most modern scholars: according to Paul Wexler, who promotes the theory, scholars prefer to ignore the topic, which is controversial, and both ideological insecurities and a perception that earlier work advancing the hypothesis was incompetent may play a role in their diffidence.〔."Most scholars are sceptical about the hypothesis." Wexler, who proposes a variation on the idea, argues that a combination of three reasons accounts for scholarly aversion to the concept: a desire not to get mixed up in controversy, ideological insecurities, and the incompetence of much earlier work in favour of that hypothesis.〕〔:"Methodologically, Wexler has opened up some new areas, taking elements of folk culture into account. I think that his conclusions have gone well beyond the evidence. Nonetheless, these are themes that should be pursued further."〕 ==History== Abraham Eliyahu Harkavi suggested as early as 1869 that there might be a link between the Khazars and European Jews.〔: Abraham Harkavy, ''O yazykye evreyev, zhivshikh v drevneye vremya na Rusi i o slavianskikh slovakh, vstrechaiuschikhsia u evreiskikh pisatelei,'' St. Petersburg.〕 Three years later, however, in 1872, a Crimean Karaite, Abraham Firkovich, alternatively proclaimed that his Turkic-speaking sect descended from Turkic converts to Judaism.〔.〕 The theory, however, that Khazar converts formed a major proportion of Ashkenazi was first proposed to a Western public by Ernest Renan in 1883.〔: Ernest Renan, "Judaism as a Race and as Religion." Delivered on the January 27, 1883.〕〔.〕 In a lecture delivered in Paris before the ''Cercle du Saint-Simon'' on 27 January 1883, Renan argued that conversion played a significant role in the formation of the Jewish people, stating that: This conversion of the kingdom of the Khazars has a considerable importance regarding the origin of those Jews who dwell in the countries along the Danube and southern Russia. These regions enclose great masses of Jewish populations which have in all probability nothing or almost nothing that is anthropologically Jewish in them.〔:Cette conversion du royaume des Khozars a une importance considérable dans la question de l’origine des juifs qui habitent les pays danubiens et le midi de la Russie. Ces régions renferment de grandes masses de populations juives qui n’ont probablement rien ou presque rien d’ethnographiquement juif.'〕 Occasional suggestions emerged that there was a small Khazar component in East European Jews in works by Joseph Jacobs (1886), Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (1893),〔, ''Israël chez les nations'' (1893):Eng.''Israel Among the Nations'' (1895).〕 Maksymilian Ernest Gumplowicz,〔. In the book ''Początki religii żydowskiej w Polsce,'' Warsaw: E. Wende i S-ka, 1903.〕 and by the Russian-Jewish anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg.〔.Goldstein writes: ‘The theory that Eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars was originally proposed by . .Samuel Weissenberg in an attempt to show that Jews were deeply rooted on Russian soil and that the cradle of Jewish civilization was the Caucasus’. Weissenberg’s book ''Die Südrussischen Juden'', was published in 1895.〕 Leroy-Beaulieu, a critic of anti-Semitism who perhaps drew on Renan, queried whether or not thousands of Polish and Russian Jews might have their origins traced back to the "old nomads of the steppes." In 1909 Hugo von Kutschera developed the notion into a book-length study,〔. ''Die Chasaren; historische Studie,'' A. Holzhauen,Vienna 1909.2nd ed., 1910.〕 arguing that Khazars formed the foundational core of the modern Ashkenazi.〔.〕 Maurice Fishberg introduced the notion to an American audience in 1911 in his book, ''The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment''.〔. Maurice Fishberg, ''The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment.''〕 When at the Versailles Peace Conference, a Jewish Zionist called Palestine the land of the Jewish people's ancestors, Joseph Reinach, a French Jewish member of parliament who was opposed to Zionism, dismissed the idea, arguing that Jews descended from Israelites were a tiny minority. In his view, conversion had played a major role in the expansion of the Jewish people, and, in addition, he claimed, the majority of "Russian, Polish and Galician Jews descend from the Khazars, a Tatar people from the south of Russia who converted to Judaism in mass at the time of Charlemagne."〔John Quigley, (''Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice,'' ) Duke University Press, 1990 p.71〕 The idea was also taken up by the Polish-Jewish economic historian and General Zionist Yitzhak Schipper in 1918,〔. Schipper’s first monograph on this was published in the ''Almanach Žydowski'' (Vienna) in 1918, While in the Warsaw ghetto before falling victim to the Holocaust at Majdanek, Schipper (1884-1943) was working on the Khazar hypothesis.〕〔.〕 by scholarly anthropologists, such as Roland B. Dixon (1923), and by writers like H. G. Wells (1921) who used it to argue that "The main part of Jewry never was in Judea",〔:"There were Arab tribes who were Jews in the time of Muhammad, and a Turkic people who were mainly Jews in South Russia in the ninth century. Judaism is indeed the reconstructed political ideal of many shattered peoples-mainly semitic. As a result of these coalescences and assimilations, almost everywhere in the towns throughout the Roman Empire, and far beyond it in the east, Jewish communities traded and flourished, and were kept in touch through the Bible, and through a religious and educational organization. The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea."〕〔.〕 a thesis that was to have a political echo in later opinion.〔: Pasha Glubb held that Russian Jews ‘have considerably less Middle Eastern blood, consisting largely of pagan Slav proselytes or of Khazar Turks.’ For Glubb, they were not 'descendants of the Judeans . .The Arabs of Palestine are probably more closely related to the Judeans (genetically) than are modern Russian or German Jews'. . 'Of course, an anti-Zionist (as well as an anti-Semitic) point is being made here: The Palestinians have a greater political right to Palestine than the Jews do, as they, not the modern-day Jews, are the true descendants of the land's Jewish inhabitants/owners'.〕〔Roland Burrage Dixon ''The Racial History of Man,'' 1923; H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (1921)〕 In 1931 Sigmund Freud wrote to Max Eitingon that the sculptor Oscar Nemon, for whom he was sitting, showed the lineaments of a "Slavic Eastern Jew, Khazar or Kalmuck or something like that".〔.〕 In 1932, Samuel Krauss ventured the theory that the biblical Ashkenaz referred to northern Asia Minor, and identified it with the Khazars, a position immediately disputed by Jacob Mann.〔.〕 Ten years later, in 1942, Abraham N. Poliak, later professor of the history of the Middle Ages at Tel Aviv University, published a Hebrew monograph in which he concluded that the East European Jews came from Khazaria.〔. 'Poliak sought the origins of Eastern European Jewry in Khazaria'. First written as an article, then as a monograph (1942), it was twice revised in 1944, and 1951 as ''Kazariyah: Toldot mamlaxa yehudit'' (Khazaria:The History of a Jewish Kingdom in Europe) Mosad Bialik, Tel Aviv, 1951.〕〔.〕 D.M. Dunlop, writing in 1954, thought very little evidence backed what he regarded as a mere assumption, and argued that the Ashkenazi-Khazar descent theory went far beyond what "our imperfect records" permit.〔.〕 Léon Poliakov, while assuming the Jews of Western Europe resulted from a "panmixia" in the first millennium, asserted in 1955 that it was widely assumed that Europe's Eastern Jews descended from a mixture of Khazarian and German Jews.〔:'As for the Jews of Eastern Europe (Poles, Russians, etc.,) it has always been assumed that they descended from an amalgamation of Jews of Khazar stock from southern Russia and German Jews (the latter having imposed their superior culture).'〕 Poliak's work found some support from Salo Wittmayer Baron and Ben-Zion Dinur,〔. Sand cites Salo Wittmayer Baron,:'before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish center of Eastern Europe'; and Ben-Zion Dinur, ''Yisrael ba-gola'' 5 vols., 3rd ed. (1961-1966)Tel-Aviv: Jerusalem:Dvir;Bialik Institute, 1961. (OCLC:492532282) vol.1 p.2,5:'The Russian conquests did not destroy the Khazar kingdom entirely, but they broke it up and diminished it And this kingdom, which had absorbed Jewish immigration and refugees from many exiles, must itself have become a diaspora mother, the mother of one of the greatest of the diasporas (''Em-galuyot, em akhat hagaluyot hagdolot'')-of Israel in Russia, Lithuania and Poland.'〕〔:’Salo Baron, who incorrectly viewed them as Finno-Ugrians, believed that the Khazars "sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centers of eastern Europe’〕 but was dismissed by Bernard Weinryb as a fiction (1962).〔:’dismissed. . .rather airily’.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Khazar theory of Ashkenazi ancestry」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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