Jews are NOT Khazars

This claim started with the book The Thirteenth Tribe.

The Thirteenth Tribe is a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler, in which the author advances the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people. Koestler hypothesized that the Khazars (who may have converted to Judaism in the 8th century) migrated westwards into Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries when the Khazar Empire was collapsing.

Koestler argued that a proof that Ashkenazi Jews have no biological connection to biblical Jews would remove the racial basis of European anti-Semitism.

Yes, it was only a theory.

According to a 2010 study by Doron Behar et al., Ashkenazi Jews form a “tight cluster” overlying non-Jewish samples from the Levant with Sephardic, Middle Eastern and North African Jewish populations and Samaritans, results being ”consistent with an historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant”. In 2013 Behar et al. published a genetic study that came up with the conclusion that there isn’t genetic evidence for the Khazar origin of Ashkenazi Jews, and instead Ashkenazi Jews are genetically closest to other Jewish groups and non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations.

So how about the Crimean Karaites?

In 1839, the Karaim scholar Abraham Firkovich was appointed by the Russian government as a researcher into the origins of the Jewish sect known as the Karaites. In 1846, one of his acquaintances, the Russian orientalist Vasilii Vasil’evich Grigor’ev (1816–1881), theorised that the Crimean Karaites were of Khazar stock. Firkovich vehemently rejected the idea, a position seconded by Firkovich, who hoped that by “proving” his people were of Turkish origin, would secure them exception from Russian anti-Jewish laws, since they bore no responsibility for Christ’s crucifixion. This idea has a notable impact in Crimean Karaite circles. It is now believed that he forged much of this material on Khazars and Karaites. Specialists in Khazar history also question the connection. Brook’s genetic study of European Karaites found no evidence of a Khazar or Turkic origin for any uniparental lineage but did reveal the European Karaites’ links to Egyptian Karaites and to Rabbinical Jewish communities.

Are 53% of Karaite Jews rhesus negative?

Koestler and his wife Cynthia killed themselves on the evening of 1 March 1983 at their London home, 8 Montpelier Square, with overdoses of the barbiturate Tuinal taken with alcohol. Their bodies were discovered on the morning of 3 March, by which time they had been dead for 36 hours.