Are Khazars the original Jews

Answer 1

No. That is an anti-Semitic canard and has been disproved through DNA analysis. The Khazars were a people in southern Russia whose small ruling class converted to Judaism (some 13 centuries ago) for trade reasons as well as for reasons of faith. At the time, there were already a few million Jews scattered throughout Europe and the Near East.

Answer 2

The Khazars were converts to Judaism, around 1200 years ago in the Crimea. Some scholars believe that only the ruling clique of the Khazars became Jewish while most of the populace did not.

There are those who make the allegation (in spite of impressive amounts of evidence to the contrary) that the Khazars formed the basis for European Jewry. This Anti-Semitic canard is alleged in an attempt to remove the Ashkenazi Jews' connection to the Middle East and therefore make the State of Israel illegitimate. However, DNA analysis of Jewish communities worldwide has debunked this myth.

Answer 3

It is unlikely. There was a Khazar kingdom in Central Asia, and there's evidence that the king and perhaps the nobility of this kingdom converted to Judaism some time vaguely around the year 800. Like other peoples in central Asia, the Khazars spoke a Turkic or perhaps Persian dialect. By that time, there were Jewish settlements dispersed across the northern Roman Empire from the Rhineland to Paris. Given that Yiddish is a Germanic language that also preserves several old French words and is peppered with Hebrew loan words, it seems far more likely that the vast majority of Ashkenazic Jews are descended from the Jewish community of the Rhineland. This community was decimated by the first Crusade, and many Jews fled east into Poland. Later wars in Poland pushed Jews farther east, and when Russia took over eastern Poland, Russia gained a large Jewish population. While there may be Khazars among them, but the most likely descendants of the Khazars are the Mountain Jews of the Ural Mountains. Their language is a Persian dialect, suggesting a solid connection.

The Khazar hypothesis seems quite popular these days with racists who want to deny the legitimacy of modern Jews -- as if conversion to Judaism makes someone less legitimately Jewish. In that case, King David and his descendants must not have been legitimately Jewish either because he was descended from Ruth, a Moabite convert. The Khazar hypothesis has nothing to do with the legitimacy of Israeli Jews, since the majority there is Sephardic and Mizrachi, descended from Jews who fled Arab lands.